To rip off another comment:

This just in! Major grocers found using customer heart rate to personalise prices - higher the pulse, higher the price!

The corporations have laid the groundwork for:

• altered prices around lunch hour for ready meals and snacks at retailers in walking distance to secondary schools
• automatic increases for products being purchased more rapidly than historical averages to capitalize on a yet unknown trend
• increases simply as stock begins running low

Professor Santiago Gallino specializing in retail management was interviewed a couple years ago by NPR for a piece about these tags.

While the labels give retailers the ability to increase prices suddenly, Gallino doubts companies like Walmart will take advantage of the technology in that way.

“To be honest, I don’t think that’s the underlying main driver of this,” Gallino said. “These are companies that tend to have a long-term relationship with their customers and I think the risk of frustrating them could be too risky, so I would be surprised if they try to do that.”

Rather than seeing an opportunity to use surge pricing, Gallino says retailers are likely drawn to electronic shelf tags to ensure consistency between online and in-store pricing.

Oh how Cartoon Network lied. We’ve been brought to a future with the technology of The Jetsons with the quality of life of Courage the Cowardly Dog.

My guess is that we’ll get legislation preventing price surges, but won’t address retailers setting their prices sky high, applying sales to basically everything, and then “reducing sale prices to more closely align with the products actual cost” as they see fit.

We know we are getting fucked, the retailers know they are fucking us, and our legislators know they are allowing us to get fucked, but the law passes anyways.