Comment by Starman_Jones
4 days ago
The use case that jumps out at me is long tail items and whales. Let’s say that you’re a wine store, and you have an assortment of nice Italian wines all priced at $40 (to make it tidy). You’ve priced them competitively to attract your Chianti drinkers to step up and splurge if it’s a special occasion. A customer walks in, and the system recognizes that’s it’s Giovanni Vinoamore. Giovanni only comes in twice a year, but when he does, he leaves with two dozen bottles of Brunello and Barolo. It automatically raises the price of all those $40 bottles to $50. In the moment, you don’t care if a Chianti drinker puts a bottle of Barolo back, because you’ll make way more than that off of Giovanni. Once Giovanni leaves, the prices return to $40.
But how do you do that without people noticing? If I pick up a $40 bottle of wine, and it's suddenly $50 when I hit the register, that's fraudulent pricing - you advertised one price when I picked up the project, but a different one because Giovanni is now in the shop.
This problem already exists in retail. Pricing algorithms are easy to run, and paper tags are difficult to change frequently or in bulk. Every store will honor the posted price, but within that there’s still a range of responses between “make the customer happy” and “the onus is on the customer to prove that the register price is incorrect.” Digital signage really tips the scales against the customers proving that the price is wrong, but I expect that most companies will adopt policies closer to the “make the customer happy” end of the spectrum. It’s not worth fighting about $10, especially if you both know they’re right.