this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2024
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Technology
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It's bound to happen. Why waste hours replacing tags when you can just change what the shelf says when the prices change.
But this article is so pro Walmart it's crazy.
Slim profit margins my ass. Walmarts gross profit for the twelve months ending July 31, 2024 was $163.786B,
I think the main concern is that this is a step towards normalizing extremely frequent price changes, a la Uber surge pricing.
It’ll be exciting to see prices temporarily jump during the few hours the majority of working class folk have to do their shopping.
As long as it's advertised openly, I don't see a big problem with it. It would probably be sold as a discount for shopping at slower times, though. It's a tried-and-true method of smoothing congestion.
Assuming a store with 9a-9p hours (every day), a 9-5 worker can shop 44 hours in a week, vs 40 they cannot. But that doesn't particularly line up with the busy hours. Around here, after 7 on weekdays and 5 on weekends tend to get pretty slow.
It's price gouging, pure and simple. There's no positive to it whatsoever
You're thinking logically and with the desire for good service. I assure you they are not.
If capitalists valued the public good instead of profit min-maxing then they wouldn't be capitalists. They'd be some kind of socialist, probably market socialist (co-ops owned by workers or the public.)
You can’t just logic this kind of thing out mathematically because during those 44 hours people have lives to live and obligations to fulfill. Families to manage, food to prepare, appointments to attend, plus they need to sleep. Busy shopping hours are busy for a reason. Nobody wants to be stuck in a busy shopping center. They just do because that’s the time they have to do it.
Since you are arguing from a perspective of what benefits society, I can only assume you must be a socialist. One of the foundational principals of capitalism is that capitalists have every moral and legal right to extract as much value from society as they can and the market will regulate itself. As long as we have a capitalist system this will always be the default position of the general public and our politicians.
Huh. TIL only socialists argue from a perspective of what benefits society...