Sadly, this article doesn't explain how this "surveillance pricing" (which is just a scarier-sounding synonym for "dynamic pricing") would even work in a physical grocery store.
Like, prices are displayed on the shelf for everyone to see. And they have to match what you pay at checkout.
So how the heck would a grocery store even do this? And this law is specifically around grocery stores.
Like, there was a big kerfuffle a while ago about how Wendy's was going to engage in dynamic pricing so that a burger would be cheaper during the slow period at e.g. 3-4 pm, compared to the lunch rush. But that wasn't personalized. And the outcry was so strong they never did it, no law needed.
Also, this law excludes loyalty programs and promotional offers, which seems to be the main way that groceries have engaged in dynamic pricing in reality -- the advertised price doesn't change, but they give certain people certain coupons. And of course, my parents were clipping coupons from newspapers decades ago, as richer people couldn't be bothered, whereas people trying to make ends meet was clip and save religiously.
> Like, there was a big kerfuffle a while ago about how Wendy's was going to engage in dynamic pricing so that a burger would be cheaper during the slow period at e.g. 3-4 pm, compared to the lunch rush. But that wasn't personalized. And the outcry was so strong they never did it, no law needed.
That's crazy that people were kerfuffled over it as stated. Restaurants very commomly have early bird and happy hour specials which sounds like the same thing. Please come when we're not usually busy, thanks.
E-ink price tags are not uncommon. Technology to track individual customers through the store based on smartphone RF is already deployed in many supermarkets. Some stores even do scan-as-you-shop, where the customer scans the item at the shelf, rather than at the front of the store. There are certainly a lot of i's to dot and t's to cross, but it's hardly a theoretical impossibility - find the right store and you could do it today with no more than a software update.
I still don't understand how that would work. Yes, e-ink is great for updating prices, I welcome it at grocery stores.
But if both me and another person are standing in front of the prosciutto and cured meats fridge, we're seeing the same prices, even if I'm poor and they're rich.
Stores are now putting QR codes for pricing, not listing the prices out on stickers/paper. You check on your phone, and often times walk through "scan and go" making direct payment on your phone.
This is often done in stores where they say that prices can change daily, and that these tools help them keep prices up to date. The darker pattern is what this law prevents, and that even with this sort of labeling, they can't charge you different from what they charge me in the same store.
I've looked online and can't find any real examples of QR code-only stores.
It seems like QR codes are growing in popularity as a way to look up more product details, user reviews, etc. -- especially at electronics stores.
But the idea of prices being hidden entirely doesn't seem to exist anywhere in normal consumer stores. There seem to have been some store experiments and retail "concepts" (prototypes not rolled out), but it seems like the consumer backlash is extremely strong so these experiments have stopped. Consumers want to be able to browse prices, that's pretty fundamental.
How is this supposed to work? There’s hundreds of people in the store. Someone is always right next to me. How will the can of peas know which price to display
Pricing will become increasingly adversarial. The Internet did too much to expose price differences to customers, so sellers are responding. Customers will need aggressive agents to price-shop on their behalf. Take hotel booking as one of the current nightmares of price visibility. Total price often isn't exposed until you show up at the hotel.
shopping, 2000: go to store. take item off shelf. hand cashier indicated amount of money. leave.
shopping, 2030: use your personalized AI agent ($100/month subscription) to simultaneously impersonate a dozen clients across five different online shopping platforms with the goal of tricking the sellers' AI agents into thinking you're poorer than you are so that you can pay $5 for bananas instead of $25.
>Customers will need aggressive agents to price-shop on their behalf. Take hotel booking as one of the current nightmares of price visibility.
Or I'll just buy as little as possible and buy used whenever possible.
The only answer I see anyone suggest is _more_ complexity. "This complex system we've built is flawed. I know what to do: I'll add another layer of complexity and abstraction on top of it."
"Needing" buying agents would be the worst possible outcome. How could I possibly trust the buying agent? Wouldn't that agent just take funds from companies to promote their products as suggestions?
The only legislation needed is one that requires transparent, searchable pricing. If the sellers can use automation to set prices, then buyers can use automation to sort prices, making all the pricing games moot.
> Governor Moore’s proposal builds on the Maryland Online Data Privacy Act of 2024 by specifically targeting the intersection of data surveillance and essential goods pricing. Under the new legislation, violations would be treated as an unfair or deceptive trade practice under the Maryland Consumer Protection Act. The Office of the Attorney General would enforce the measure, with merchants subject to civil penalties of up to $10,000 for a first offense and up to $25,000 for subsequent offenses.
If a grocer has the finances to deploy a system like this, they're close to the size of Kroger / Walmart. These fines are way too low.
> While the law bans setting higher prices through surveillance pricing, it doesn’t address reducing prices. If a company raises its prices for everyone, and then offers individualized discounts, “suddenly you’ve arrived at the same outcome,” McBrien says.
While I agree with the intent of this law, I don't think it will be effective. If you have a system capable of jacking prices up you can just multiply this calculated delta by -1 transform that into a discount.
To effectively prevent this practice you probably need to ban any kind of personal discount. I don't think we will ever see such law, nor do I think this would be a good idea.
Yeah, sounds like a law that's passed because it sounds/polls good (ie. "affordability"), even though it's addressing a non-existent problem and is trivial to work around.
Uber pays drivers differential rates depending on how desperate they believe the driver to be. I can believe that UberEats demands a higher premium depending on the item and what they infer about you.
Most pricing laws are built on the idea that this isn't OK. For example, I can't negotiate pricing directly with an automobile manufacturer. I have to go through a dealer so I am "protected".
Is this why grocery stores are so keen to get you to use their coupon app or hand them your phone number?
I always refuse, but I always wondered what they do with the data.
> Gosh, I hope colleges don't find out about this pricing strategy.
They've been doing it for years; it's called "financial aid". It is literally the textbook example of how to get people to pay different amounts for the same thing based on what they are willing or able to pay.
It's also why the recent shift in immigration policy has affected top-tier universities so much: domestic education is, by and large, subsidized by international students who are almost exclusively admitted on a need-aware basis, allowing the schools to ensure the financials work out on paper.
Now that there's been a huge drop in international applications, they need to make up the loss in revenue, so they're shifting those costs back to domestic applicants.
> Now that there's been a huge drop in international applications, they need to make up the loss in revenue, so they're shifting those costs back to domestic applicants.
Is haggling an individualized price? What's stopping companies from allowing arbitrary bids on any item they can choose to reject? What if the future of the grocery store is eBay, a true nightmare.
This sounds crazy! Makes budgeting impossible! Imagine someone is on low income and doesn’t know how much the grocery shopping will cost! Whoever came up with this should be burned
If stores raise their prices and cite this law as the reason why, that will fit with Maryland's overall theme as an eccessively exepensive state to live in.
One thing about "surveillance pricing" I've not seen addressed is that it destroys the usual model of demand curve. A given buyer may be judged to have the resources to pay a particular (high) price for a good, but other factors may be relevant: that buyer might need to save on good A in order to buy more of good B. The "surveillance pricer" would demand a higher price for good A because it has no information about need for good B by the buyer.
That's a simplistic example, but we've been lectured about consumer choices, invisible hands of marketplaces, demand curves and marginal value for so long I'm genuinely shocked that ill-defined "predatory pricing" is the issue we see in the news.
Not defending the legitimately douchey things amazon does, but it explains it right in that article :
>In short, an Amazon listing features prices not only offered by Amazon, but by other sellers. Some of these sellers may offer the items at a lower price, but the order will not be fulfilled by Amazon and won’t be subject to Prime’s shipping discounts and faster delivery.
If you're a prime member and logged it, it will prioritize purchases fulfilled by amazon and delivered with prime delivery. If you click "Other sellers on amazon" there will sometimes be sellers that are cheaper with shipping than purchasing through prime.
Not necessarily. The easy way to implement this in-person would be to give customer-specific coupons. You could get an email that says "use your loyalty card at checkout and get $2 off eggs". Then you just give everyone a different discount and only the privacy-minded folks end up paying the (inflated) sticker price.
A significantly more complex hypothetical that I don't think anyone is doing yet: With digital price tags and customer tracking you could show different prices to different customers in-person. For example, when Alice goes to the eggs it could say $2 and when Bob goes to the eggs it could say $4. Then you just need to track the customer to the register to make sure you give them the price that was displayed. I believe the amazon "go" stores were doing the whole customer tracking thing so we already have the necessary tech demonstrated in real stores.
>Then you just give everyone a different discount and only the privacy-minded folks end up paying the (inflated) sticker price.
This is already happening at Lidl. I was standing in line one day and the lady in front of me asked if I had the app, because there was something like a $5 off $50 purchase coupon in there I could use. I did have the app and checked, but my coupon instead was for $15 off $150.
Thinking a little more deeply about it, every time I go there I tend to spend an average of around $125. My hypothesis is that they have that data and know a customer's average spend, so they tailor the coupon's dollar amounts to the customer to entice them to spend slightly more than they usually do.
FYI, I specifically mentioned Aldi because they don't have loyalty cards. I understand that might not have been clear to everyone, so I'll edit my comment to make it clear.
Ah, yeah I don't have an Aldi near me so I didn't know that. Regardless, the same approach could be applied via emailing coupons with barcodes to scan at the register. It'd just be less convenient for the customer than having it automatically applied via a loyalty card.
"The easy way to implement this in-person would be to give customer-specific coupons. You could get an email that says "use your loyalty card at checkout and get $2 off eggs"."
This already happens. We've been getting personalized coupons from our local store for 15+ years now.
My mainstream supermarket in Nordics has for the longest time given individual coupons in their loyalty program.
There are three tiers of discount. There are general special offers, advertised widely, to get people through the door. Then there are members only discounts, advertised in store, to get people to be members. Then there are mailed to members personal discounts that are uncannily accurate for what is running out to get you to go shopping now instead of later. These days the hand scanners and apps also tell you what coupons you have so you don’t need mail but junk mail is still regular.
How much my food costs is quite consequential, and I think it's very important to understand whether or not a business has some hackneyed algorithm that tells them to charge me 50% more than the man standing next to me.
"too high for my liking" is doing a lot of work there.
Some of these loans are outright predatory, with multi-thousand-percent interest rates. These aren't loans that people who have better options are taking, and moreover I think a lot of people really don't understand how horrible that can be. Call your congressperson to get more funding for math education, and then maybe we can argue we should get rid of usury laws.
I guess I feel like the term "consent" is weaponized; did people opt into these loans? Sure, I suppose in a sense, but these are extremely desperate people and it is hard to say that what they opted into is "consent" in the classic sense of the term. They only take these loans because they feel like they don't have other options, not because they were able to compare rates across different banks and choose the best, and upon accepting these loans they can very easily get into situations where paying off the debt is functionally impossible.
Not sure how I feel about selling organs so I won't touch that one.
> I guess I feel like the term "consent" is weaponized; did people opt into these loans?
That also leads into complex questions like "is it really consent if the alternative is X", or "can someone consent to chattel slavery", or "at what point is chemical addiction no longer consensual", etc.
_______________
> "I should not agree with your young [socialistic] friends," said Marcus curtly, "I am so old-fashioned as to believe in free contract."
> "I, being older, perhaps believe in it even more," answered [Monsieur] Louis smiling. "But surely it is a very old principle of law that a leonine contract is not a free contract. And it is hypocrisy to pretend that a bargain between a starving man and a man with all the food is anything but a leonine contract." He glanced up at the fire-escape, a ladder leading up to the balcony of a very high attic above. "I live in that garret; or rather on that balcony. If I fell off the balcony and hung on a spike, so far from the steps that somebody with a ladder could offer to rescue me if I gave him a hundred million francs, I should be quite morally justified in using his ladder and then telling him to go to hell for his hundred million. Hell, indeed, is not out of the picture; for it is a sin of injustice to force an advantage against the desperate. Well, all those poor men are desperate; they all hang starving on spikes. If they must not bargain collectively, they cannot bargain at all. You are not supporting contract; you are opposing all contract; for yours cannot be a real contract at all."
Sadly, this article doesn't explain how this "surveillance pricing" (which is just a scarier-sounding synonym for "dynamic pricing") would even work in a physical grocery store.
Like, prices are displayed on the shelf for everyone to see. And they have to match what you pay at checkout.
So how the heck would a grocery store even do this? And this law is specifically around grocery stores.
Like, there was a big kerfuffle a while ago about how Wendy's was going to engage in dynamic pricing so that a burger would be cheaper during the slow period at e.g. 3-4 pm, compared to the lunch rush. But that wasn't personalized. And the outcry was so strong they never did it, no law needed.
Also, this law excludes loyalty programs and promotional offers, which seems to be the main way that groceries have engaged in dynamic pricing in reality -- the advertised price doesn't change, but they give certain people certain coupons. And of course, my parents were clipping coupons from newspapers decades ago, as richer people couldn't be bothered, whereas people trying to make ends meet was clip and save religiously.
> Like, there was a big kerfuffle a while ago about how Wendy's was going to engage in dynamic pricing so that a burger would be cheaper during the slow period at e.g. 3-4 pm, compared to the lunch rush. But that wasn't personalized. And the outcry was so strong they never did it, no law needed.
That's crazy that people were kerfuffled over it as stated. Restaurants very commomly have early bird and happy hour specials which sounds like the same thing. Please come when we're not usually busy, thanks.
E-ink price tags are not uncommon. Technology to track individual customers through the store based on smartphone RF is already deployed in many supermarkets. Some stores even do scan-as-you-shop, where the customer scans the item at the shelf, rather than at the front of the store. There are certainly a lot of i's to dot and t's to cross, but it's hardly a theoretical impossibility - find the right store and you could do it today with no more than a software update.
I still don't understand how that would work. Yes, e-ink is great for updating prices, I welcome it at grocery stores.
But if both me and another person are standing in front of the prosciutto and cured meats fridge, we're seeing the same prices, even if I'm poor and they're rich.
Well that's easy enough - don't apply sneaky pricing when there's two people looking.
Stores are now putting QR codes for pricing, not listing the prices out on stickers/paper. You check on your phone, and often times walk through "scan and go" making direct payment on your phone.
This is often done in stores where they say that prices can change daily, and that these tools help them keep prices up to date. The darker pattern is what this law prevents, and that even with this sort of labeling, they can't charge you different from what they charge me in the same store.
I've looked online and can't find any real examples of QR code-only stores.
It seems like QR codes are growing in popularity as a way to look up more product details, user reviews, etc. -- especially at electronics stores.
But the idea of prices being hidden entirely doesn't seem to exist anywhere in normal consumer stores. There seem to have been some store experiments and retail "concepts" (prototypes not rolled out), but it seems like the consumer backlash is extremely strong so these experiments have stopped. Consumers want to be able to browse prices, that's pretty fundamental.
Here's an example (not mine): https://old.reddit.com/r/mildlyinfuriating/comments/1s0n9al/...
I also saw this in a gas station convenience store near me but I did not take a photo. I haven't seen it in a real grocery store yet.
So we’re now going to spend several hours at the grocery store, scanning every item and waiting for some app to come back with a custom price?
Interested know which stores are doing this QR code for pricing thing (and what area of the country).
Facial recognition
https://epic.org/krogers-surveillance-pricing-harms-consumer...
How is this supposed to work? There’s hundreds of people in the store. Someone is always right next to me. How will the can of peas know which price to display
Pricing will become increasingly adversarial. The Internet did too much to expose price differences to customers, so sellers are responding. Customers will need aggressive agents to price-shop on their behalf. Take hotel booking as one of the current nightmares of price visibility. Total price often isn't exposed until you show up at the hotel.
shopping, 2000: go to store. take item off shelf. hand cashier indicated amount of money. leave.
shopping, 2030: use your personalized AI agent ($100/month subscription) to simultaneously impersonate a dozen clients across five different online shopping platforms with the goal of tricking the sellers' AI agents into thinking you're poorer than you are so that you can pay $5 for bananas instead of $25.
>Customers will need aggressive agents to price-shop on their behalf. Take hotel booking as one of the current nightmares of price visibility.
Or I'll just buy as little as possible and buy used whenever possible.
The only answer I see anyone suggest is _more_ complexity. "This complex system we've built is flawed. I know what to do: I'll add another layer of complexity and abstraction on top of it."
"Needing" buying agents would be the worst possible outcome. How could I possibly trust the buying agent? Wouldn't that agent just take funds from companies to promote their products as suggestions?
Customers require consumer legislation and protections, not further entrenchment of AI oligopolies.
The only legislation needed is one that requires transparent, searchable pricing. If the sellers can use automation to set prices, then buyers can use automation to sort prices, making all the pricing games moot.
Citizens require a lack of surveillance. Full stop.
Sadly, there is no provision in this law to allow consumers to sue the companies.
You have to report it, and then maybe the office of the Attorney General _might_ impose a fine on the grocery store:
https://governor.maryland.gov/news/press/pages/governor-moor...
> Governor Moore’s proposal builds on the Maryland Online Data Privacy Act of 2024 by specifically targeting the intersection of data surveillance and essential goods pricing. Under the new legislation, violations would be treated as an unfair or deceptive trade practice under the Maryland Consumer Protection Act. The Office of the Attorney General would enforce the measure, with merchants subject to civil penalties of up to $10,000 for a first offense and up to $25,000 for subsequent offenses.
If a grocer has the finances to deploy a system like this, they're close to the size of Kroger / Walmart. These fines are way too low.
> While the law bans setting higher prices through surveillance pricing, it doesn’t address reducing prices. If a company raises its prices for everyone, and then offers individualized discounts, “suddenly you’ve arrived at the same outcome,” McBrien says.
While I agree with the intent of this law, I don't think it will be effective. If you have a system capable of jacking prices up you can just multiply this calculated delta by -1 transform that into a discount.
To effectively prevent this practice you probably need to ban any kind of personal discount. I don't think we will ever see such law, nor do I think this would be a good idea.
Yeah, sounds like a law that's passed because it sounds/polls good (ie. "affordability"), even though it's addressing a non-existent problem and is trivial to work around.
Uber pays drivers differential rates depending on how desperate they believe the driver to be. I can believe that UberEats demands a higher premium depending on the item and what they infer about you.
>I don't think we will ever see such law, nor do I think this would be a good idea.
Why isn't this a good idea?
Buyers and sellers should be able to negotiate prices however they want. It is how markets have worked since the dawn of human trading.
It would also be costly to police.
If the problem is that a grocery store has a monopoly in an area, then that is a different problem fixed by adding grocery store(s).
This is a law about grocery stores. How much haggling do you think is happening at grocery stores?
Most pricing laws are built on the idea that this isn't OK. For example, I can't negotiate pricing directly with an automobile manufacturer. I have to go through a dealer so I am "protected".
Is this why grocery stores are so keen to get you to use their coupon app or hand them your phone number? I always refuse, but I always wondered what they do with the data.
Gosh, I hope colleges don't find out about this pricing strategy.
> Gosh, I hope colleges don't find out about this pricing strategy.
They've been doing it for years; it's called "financial aid". It is literally the textbook example of how to get people to pay different amounts for the same thing based on what they are willing or able to pay.
It's also why the recent shift in immigration policy has affected top-tier universities so much: domestic education is, by and large, subsidized by international students who are almost exclusively admitted on a need-aware basis, allowing the schools to ensure the financials work out on paper.
Now that there's been a huge drop in international applications, they need to make up the loss in revenue, so they're shifting those costs back to domestic applicants.
Yes, that's the joke. I think the parent post was sarcasm.
> Now that there's been a huge drop in international applications, they need to make up the loss in revenue, so they're shifting those costs back to domestic applicants.
Or, gasp, cut bloat.
Is haggling an individualized price? What's stopping companies from allowing arbitrary bids on any item they can choose to reject? What if the future of the grocery store is eBay, a true nightmare.
or you will ask bids for your shopping list, and get replies from several retail chains (or, rather their AI agents).
This sounds crazy! Makes budgeting impossible! Imagine someone is on low income and doesn’t know how much the grocery shopping will cost! Whoever came up with this should be burned
>Imagine someone is on low income and doesn’t know how much the grocery shopping will cost!
Go to a food market in a developing country, and that is how it works. Everyone is haggling for everything all the time.
More Perfect did a great investigation on this and Instacart
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=osxr7xSxsGo
https://invidious.nerdvpn.de/watch?v=osxr7xSxsGo
If stores raise their prices and cite this law as the reason why, that will fit with Maryland's overall theme as an eccessively exepensive state to live in.
That's called cartel pricing and its illegal.
Is it excessive? Expensive, certainly, but if I wanted cheap I'd go live in shack in the mountains.
All 50 states should do this. It's violently anti-consumer to price in this manner.
One thing about "surveillance pricing" I've not seen addressed is that it destroys the usual model of demand curve. A given buyer may be judged to have the resources to pay a particular (high) price for a good, but other factors may be relevant: that buyer might need to save on good A in order to buy more of good B. The "surveillance pricer" would demand a higher price for good A because it has no information about need for good B by the buyer.
That's a simplistic example, but we've been lectured about consumer choices, invisible hands of marketplaces, demand curves and marginal value for so long I'm genuinely shocked that ill-defined "predatory pricing" is the issue we see in the news.
Dude, this "surveillance pricing" is fucking bullshit. Good on them.
Hope you renewed your Prime membership because they're the worst offender.
Do different Prime members get different prices?
https://dailydot.com/amazon-charging-more-prime-members
It appears so, yes. And prime pays more per item.
Not defending the legitimately douchey things amazon does, but it explains it right in that article :
>In short, an Amazon listing features prices not only offered by Amazon, but by other sellers. Some of these sellers may offer the items at a lower price, but the order will not be fulfilled by Amazon and won’t be subject to Prime’s shipping discounts and faster delivery.
If you're a prime member and logged it, it will prioritize purchases fulfilled by amazon and delivered with prime delivery. If you click "Other sellers on amazon" there will sometimes be sellers that are cheaper with shipping than purchasing through prime.
Just going to Aldi and shopping for yourself insulates you from this nonsense, no?
ETA: Aldi here is representing any store without a loyalty program
Not necessarily. The easy way to implement this in-person would be to give customer-specific coupons. You could get an email that says "use your loyalty card at checkout and get $2 off eggs". Then you just give everyone a different discount and only the privacy-minded folks end up paying the (inflated) sticker price.
A significantly more complex hypothetical that I don't think anyone is doing yet: With digital price tags and customer tracking you could show different prices to different customers in-person. For example, when Alice goes to the eggs it could say $2 and when Bob goes to the eggs it could say $4. Then you just need to track the customer to the register to make sure you give them the price that was displayed. I believe the amazon "go" stores were doing the whole customer tracking thing so we already have the necessary tech demonstrated in real stores.
>Then you just give everyone a different discount and only the privacy-minded folks end up paying the (inflated) sticker price.
This is already happening at Lidl. I was standing in line one day and the lady in front of me asked if I had the app, because there was something like a $5 off $50 purchase coupon in there I could use. I did have the app and checked, but my coupon instead was for $15 off $150.
Thinking a little more deeply about it, every time I go there I tend to spend an average of around $125. My hypothesis is that they have that data and know a customer's average spend, so they tailor the coupon's dollar amounts to the customer to entice them to spend slightly more than they usually do.
i really doubt the downsides of adding that layer of complexity can compete with the upsides of surveillance pricing.
FYI, I specifically mentioned Aldi because they don't have loyalty cards. I understand that might not have been clear to everyone, so I'll edit my comment to make it clear.
Ah, yeah I don't have an Aldi near me so I didn't know that. Regardless, the same approach could be applied via emailing coupons with barcodes to scan at the register. It'd just be less convenient for the customer than having it automatically applied via a loyalty card.
"The easy way to implement this in-person would be to give customer-specific coupons. You could get an email that says "use your loyalty card at checkout and get $2 off eggs"."
This already happens. We've been getting personalized coupons from our local store for 15+ years now.
My mainstream supermarket in Nordics has for the longest time given individual coupons in their loyalty program.
There are three tiers of discount. There are general special offers, advertised widely, to get people through the door. Then there are members only discounts, advertised in store, to get people to be members. Then there are mailed to members personal discounts that are uncannily accurate for what is running out to get you to go shopping now instead of later. These days the hand scanners and apps also tell you what coupons you have so you don’t need mail but junk mail is still regular.
TBH as a shopper it works great.
dirtbag egalitarianism wins again
Forget high taxes and crime. Maryland is tackling the issues important to them: predatory pricing on Utz Crab Chips.
Maryland’s crime solutions are working, and have been for some time. It’s in metaphorical maintenance mode, rather than needing active development.
Maryland minus Baltimore? Seems like Baltimore is in the top 10 for violent crimes, but drops to #12 for murder.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...
Typical HN webdevery, doesn’t understand that more than one thing can be done a time.
This is so embarrassing. I can’t imagine being concerned about something so inconsequential. Just go to another grocery store.
Banning a pricing model should be unconstitutional
It's so embarrassing that we banned forcing employees to work sixteen hour days without lunch breaks. Just go to another employer.
Banning an employment model should be unconstitutional.
How much my food costs is quite consequential, and I think it's very important to understand whether or not a business has some hackneyed algorithm that tells them to charge me 50% more than the man standing next to me.
> Banning a pricing model should be unconstitutional
"Unconscionable contracts" and "Usury" called--you're behind on your debt and your kidney is being seized. :p
There's also some not-so-fun history there when it comes to charging people based on their skin-color.
The concept of usury is so silly.
“Oh no, someone is offering me a loan at a rate that is too high for my liking!”
Organ markets should be legal as well.
"too high for my liking" is doing a lot of work there.
Some of these loans are outright predatory, with multi-thousand-percent interest rates. These aren't loans that people who have better options are taking, and moreover I think a lot of people really don't understand how horrible that can be. Call your congressperson to get more funding for math education, and then maybe we can argue we should get rid of usury laws.
I guess I feel like the term "consent" is weaponized; did people opt into these loans? Sure, I suppose in a sense, but these are extremely desperate people and it is hard to say that what they opted into is "consent" in the classic sense of the term. They only take these loans because they feel like they don't have other options, not because they were able to compare rates across different banks and choose the best, and upon accepting these loans they can very easily get into situations where paying off the debt is functionally impossible.
Not sure how I feel about selling organs so I won't touch that one.
> I guess I feel like the term "consent" is weaponized; did people opt into these loans?
That also leads into complex questions like "is it really consent if the alternative is X", or "can someone consent to chattel slavery", or "at what point is chemical addiction no longer consensual", etc.
_______________
> "I should not agree with your young [socialistic] friends," said Marcus curtly, "I am so old-fashioned as to believe in free contract."
> "I, being older, perhaps believe in it even more," answered [Monsieur] Louis smiling. "But surely it is a very old principle of law that a leonine contract is not a free contract. And it is hypocrisy to pretend that a bargain between a starving man and a man with all the food is anything but a leonine contract." He glanced up at the fire-escape, a ladder leading up to the balcony of a very high attic above. "I live in that garret; or rather on that balcony. If I fell off the balcony and hung on a spike, so far from the steps that somebody with a ladder could offer to rescue me if I gave him a hundred million francs, I should be quite morally justified in using his ladder and then telling him to go to hell for his hundred million. Hell, indeed, is not out of the picture; for it is a sin of injustice to force an advantage against the desperate. Well, all those poor men are desperate; they all hang starving on spikes. If they must not bargain collectively, they cannot bargain at all. You are not supporting contract; you are opposing all contract; for yours cannot be a real contract at all."
-- The Paradoxes of Mr. Pond by GK Chesterton [https://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks05/0500421h.html]
No they shouldn’t be.