this post was submitted on 16 Sep 2024
99 points (99.0% liked)
Business
430 readers
57 users here now
A place to share business news and insights.
Rules
- Follow lemmy.world rules
- Only post content related to business
- Do not use this community to promote your business
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Why is it we allow these companies to pretend they did no evil? The penalty should have been a couple orders of magnitude higher, and they should have had to admit what they did. Obviously we don't live in a world where both those things would happen, but we don't even get one of them?
They surely made more than two million doing this and so the fine is meaningless. The real way to make it meaningful would be to force the admission of guilt, and then use the admission as justification to stop them from buying out the competition for 18 billion dollars.
Look how they deceived their customers, good thing they can do it to even more customers now!
I see it less as "being evil" and more about "being incompetent".
Changing shelf labels in a store the size of a Home Depot is incredibly manual, which is why WalMart moved to e-ink electronic shelf tags. That way, the same system that updates prices at the register updates the tags.
https://corporate.walmart.com/news/2024/06/06/new-tech-better-outcomes-digital-shelf-labels-are-a-win-for-customers-and-associates
Of course that also lets them do surge pricing instantly. "Oh, schools out? Increase prices +.04%!"
0.04%? More like 14%
Maybe, if items are under-priced as often as over-priced.
In an inflationary environment, prices are only going one direction and the shelf tags are going to lag.
Evil was a stretch, sure. Though while I appreciate the concept of not attributing malice to what incompetence explains, I think that needs to be couched by whether or not a profit is being turned by the action.