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this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2024
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A Boring Dystopia
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Ya'll, this already happens - wholesale and retail pricing vs consumer pricing. This exact principle is why many states refuse sales tax - those disproportionately affect poorer people because a lot of rich people can buy items through their LLCs and get bulk or retailer pricing.
Costco has memberships based on this - there's the regular and then the executive memberships. You spend more on the higher level memberships (essentially an income check) and also get more money back later. Credit card promos function like this. Credit scores and loans function like this.
Grocery stores (capital) will never give us a break on food (money). They will always try to find a way to make the poor pay even more. That's why it's called capitalism - all that is valued is capital and capital accrues more capital. That's the game.
Costco, credit card promos, and loans are all opt-in, though; you have to initiate the transaction. You make the choice, you have some level of control (even if that is only walking away).
This, on the other hand, is making changes to a necessity that's offered to you based on something outside your control; you have no ability to control the transaction's decision, and you can't just walk away from buying food.
Yes, this is the game. But it's playing with people's lives; and whereas capitalism used to guarantee that companies would compete with one another to get prices as low as they could be, this AI "innovation"—coupled with the "not collusion, wink wink" of four megacorps controlling everything—means that something needs to be done. And it needs to be something more than just "shrug, capital gonna capital."
I recognize price controls would be a bit too much to hope for in this society, but demanding price transparency and equity seems like something we could actually manage.
I mean I don't think this is fair, but I also don't think this will ever happen in this way. If something like this happened, it would be to increase the price for poorer people to drive them away, because poorer people tend to use more resources and drive away rich people.
Part of the issue with real goods pricing, especially food, is that it directly reflects the stock market. The word "stock" itself comes from "livestock." A farmer in the 1800s predicted many peaks/troughs of the stock market based on solar cycles - the Benner cycle. https://www.therationalinvestor.com/blog/how-the-benner-cycle-predicts-100-years-of-market-movement
Owning physical stock is what the stock market is kinda based on, plus a weird family feud popularity contest and insider trading.
So to regulate the price of goods, we will.have ti regulate the stock market. To regulate the stock market, we will have to regulate the ownership of companies, because that's what the stock market also is - ownership in a company. I'm all for mandating every company be a cooperatively owned, worker owned company. I'd vote for that TODAY.
Isn't it already happening, though? Maybe not for necessities, at least not yet; but if you're researching travel, the common wisdom is to research through private browsers to be sure that they can't jack up the price on you to create an artificial incentive to buy before the price goes up again. If you are booking certain things like rental cars, booking through a VPN based in a country with a favorable exchange rate or lower number of tourists can sometimes get you a preferential rate. If capitalists are willing to deploy that sort of thing online, you can bet they're hoping for the ability to do so in real life.
Same. Even if we mandated that all companies' voting shares include 50% plus one vote shares controlled by employees, it would be a huge step in the right direction.
Sure, but you'll notice that's something you have to work hard to bypass capitalism to do. It's not something capitalists are actually offering or would program into their algorithms, because it's directly against anything capitalism values or rewards. They are not here to provide a service. They are here to take money, to make capital. Which is often why they make the system less efficient, eg Turbo Tax. Giving a discount eats into their profit margins, so they'd rather lose the customer than lose the profit margin, because their resources are all finite. Yes there may be a discount in some countries, but within the same store it is very unlikely they will reward poverty by giving it a discount and eating into their profit margins. It just doesn't make sense. This meme is propaganda to upset the middle class towards the poor.
And yes I'd take ANYTHING approaching the limit of worker owned companies. Also if every election could be approval based voting or ranked choice.
So why do stores have sales, ever? No, although groceries are low-margin items, they still retain high enough markups that they can still make money even with discounts, particularly when offering loss leaders. And with this technology, they can optimize for both price and customer retention, by keeping a price artificially inflated for those who can afford it and only lowering it when they're at risk of losing a customer.
Which sounds like a good idea, right? But it's not going to be accurate, ever. They're only ever going to miscategorize people and charge single moms double.
And let's be honest, it won't be used to give poor people discounts. It'll be used to raise prices for middle class people.
Now you're really singing my song.
I'm not even rich, but I'm considering doing this so I can skip the 22% sales tax on some purchases. I'm in IT so there's no way they could argue that my next gaming PC ISN'T a business asset. I could be running AI models on the GPU!