I don't think they are "likely" going to do that. Its literally their intended purpose

This isn't a defense of them, more a condemnation of the system we have atrophied into... but wouldn't it be illegal for a publicaly traded company to invest a bunch of capital into a new system that didn't squeeze more profits out of people and depress employee costs further?

I remember this quote from a reptile's lover: Expecting companies to not seek profit is like expecting love from a pet snake.

Like snake companies are not designed to love the people that feed them and make them exist. It is unreasonable to anthropomorphize them and expect anything else from them than the maximization of profits.

Which is why where companies work, we should just put safeguard rails so that they don't bite people where they can. And this is also why we should seek other arrangements for any sort of endeavours where the maximization of profit is not the correct incentive.

Can we have a full automated communism now?

Or is it still too early?

We are squeezing down the margins on everything. At one point, we should accept that profit is not the correct incentive to make things better.

Lets be honest, replacing labels on a shelf is hardly a job we need to be saving.

Just make it illegal to raise prices on products while customers are in the shop so that they can't change the price between you picking it up and going to pay for it.

Watch the bottled water prices trippling on hot days and before disasters

If you don’t like what the price tags show, just change them yourself using an app.

From the article, it’s interesting that some U.S. states have banned the e-pricetags:

• Maryland banned surveillance pricing in April
• Connecticut signed a ban into law in June
• New Jersey signed a ban into law in July

Europe is not on the ball AFAIK.

The one good thing about these electronic tags --you would expect-- would be accurate prices. But I’ve already discovered cases where the cash register price differed from the shelf price. I took the cashier back to the price, and the shelf price was still different (thus it was not a case of the price changing after I grabbed the item.. it was in fact a database inconsistency). I have also seen cases where the price per unit wildly differed from reality, which is contrary to what you would expect if everything is electronic.

unreasonable to anthropomorphize

I agree, but exceptionally I also agree with RMS who said something like “all corporations are psychopathic”.

It’s a good start but a bit trickier. I guess we also need to ban personalized pricing. If the shop is empty and someone approaches, we would not want the prices to update for that person just before they enter. Also, the price of allergy meds could still jump up just before they open the shop on a day with a high pollen count.

The price of allergy meds can already jump during hayfever season, changing a paper tag is done fairly frequently already.

If anti-consumer dynamic pricing is in play with medicine, as you suggest, the shenanigans should be controlled independant of whether the tags are electronic.

That's anthropomorphization too. Psychopaths have a malfunctioning empathy. Companies don't have it. That's like saying a bird is a double arm amputee. Different beasts.

honestly i see little reason stores shouldn't just have weekly pricing, with some sort of exception made for end-of-day discounts to get rid of stuff like rotisserie chickens and items near the expiry date.

Price inconsistencies are primarily because companies sell half assed solutions.

Company A sells the PoS system, it's CRM, database, management seats and support.

Company B sells the e-pricetag system, its CRM, database, gateway (most either use Bluetooth or a custom 802.15.4 based protocol, ZigBee but not really), management seats and support.

Since there's literally hundreds of Company A's and Company B's, and there's absofuckinglutely no standard for either product, it's a hit and miss if the systems can actually work together - primarily because the acquisitions aren't done by involving engineers/experts who pick the best fitting system but by having some dumbass VP or C-suite who knows a guy who knows a guy (and most likely there's a nice kickback chain), and another dumbass middle manager picks the other, compatibility being potentially the least important aspect.

Then you have the clusterfuck of systems not working together, and needing someone to manage the PoS, someone to manage the price tags, and either a C-suite's 15 year old nephew who's a "programming genius" (managed to prompt Claude to write a calculator app he showed off once) gets some nice money for writing a godawful bridge between the two that kind of works when the stars align right (and breaks after three months because both systems got updated), or there's an actual underpaid gofer whose sole task is to keep the databases in sync.

Also, are those really e-pricetag bans, or hostile pricing tactics bans? I think that distinction matters.

Corporations are run by people. Those people potentially have empathy. But often CEOs are psychopathic. It’s no coincidence. IIRC, research found that psychopaths also lack empathy for themselves, which means when they fail they do not dwell on it or give a shit about their own pride. They just refine their skill move ahead like a learning machine. It is because of that propensity for psychopaths to shed emotion and be successful in business that they often end up as CEOs. The ideal CEO for shareholders to get max profit is one who robotically makes the best most calculated decision for profit. So it’s sensible enough to think of a corporation as human with malfunctioning empathy. The main difference is that the malfunction is desired and deliberately selected by the shareholders.

BTW, for some reason I did not get a notification of your reply. I just happened to be back in this thread when I saw your reply.

(edit) I wonder if it’s because your msg was tagged as français that I did not receive a notification.
(edit 2) I had no language selected, not even the “undetermined” language choice. After setting my language to undetermined, I was able to see notifications of your reply.

The links are there. I followed one of them to this:

“State legislatures across the country are actively working to protect their communities from the dangers of ESLs, introducing bills banning the use of electronic shelving labels and the practice of dynamic pricing in our food and drug stores.”

It's a shame the two things got binned together. ESLs are super handy when done right. The issue is the predatory pricing changes.