Please oh please stop making the future suck (grocery store edition)

There was a word I read a few weeks ago that I can't get out of my head: Gamification. And by "can't get out of my head," I mean I am beginning to think we need to brick up the whole of Silicon Valley, Cask of Amontillado style, and tell the authorities that the whole thing never existed. I am really not sure the world needs gamified personalized advertisement-riddled smart shopping carts.

"Caper Carts sync with grocery stores’ loyalty accounts to give customers discounts and personalized advertisements, and have ‘gamification’ features to give customers rewards for fulfilling certain shopping behaviors like spending a certain amount of money."

That's from a Bluesky post by Hypervisible; If you're not a Bluesky member you can go to this Forbes article to see a picture, which looks ... sigh. Sure, whatever. Yeah, these are what we're going to be dealing with next in our lives. Gamified shopping carts. The extension of the Eternal Screen into every aspect of our lives, unbidden, so that we can be gamified.

There's no part of this that doesn't sound absolutely awful. The part where these things ostensibly can tell what you've put in your cart and allow you stroll on out without waiting in a checkout line does sound lovely and is something consumers would seem to genuinely want, except for the part where you walk out the door and a loud alarm goes off telling everyone you don't have enough money on your debit cart to pay for it and some armed parking lot robot shoots out your tires or however that ends up working. Amazon appears to be the primary vendor of "smart" shopping carts that shove a glowing screen between you and your purchases, and appears to be undeterred by the humiliation it has faced for its similar and not-ready-for-prime-time "Just Walk Out" programs.

The Fortune article is filled with tidbits that make me think that nobody in the technology sector has ever met a real person, and that's not even counting the name "Caper Carts," which sounds like some weird and extremely sketchy carnival ride.

“We’re transforming shopping from a chore to an adventure,” Instacart told Fortune.

Please stop.

“We’re going on a journey of saying, ‘You can have great items, great prices like the rest of the club channel, but you can also have convenience,’” Sam’s Club CEO told CNBC in an interview last month. “And that’s something that really is resonating.”

I'm begging you to stop.

Grocers plan to increase spending on AI technologies by 400% before 2025, according to a June 2023 report from the Food Industry Association and e-commerce service Wynshop.

I do not need an AI to tell me what things to put in my cart. I do not grocery prices to go up yet again so that I can have an AI tell me what things I should put in my cart. I do not need to play Candy Crush on my shopping cart while wheeling it through a fluorescent-lit hellscape of toothpaste variations as I am serenaded by new in-store music that consists primarily of an AI-generated voice singing about a new variety of clam chowder. I do not want the future the world insists on giving me.

I'm not sure if the best part of these new "make shopping into an on-screen experience" carts is that they intentionally discourage people from looking where they're going while shopping—I wonder whether the cost analysis teams took into account the increased numbers of people who are going to careen into end-of-aisle displays—or if it's that they look to make actually putting things in the cart to be pretty damn awkward.

Well, at least there's a critic expressing skepticism about these new trends.

“If you go into self-checkout [for example], what the stores did was move the burden of the store associate onto the consumer,” he said.

Right. I loathe self-checkout lines because as much as I do not like interacting with people, I'm even less eager to take on the frequent role of "volunteer IT guy" when the thing invariably can't recognize something in the order, misidentifies something, or starts treating the "bagging area" like a World War II minefield and will NOT, I tell you will NOT tolerate you putting that apple there. If your new smart shopping cart makes errors that then require shoppers to talk to someone in the store capable of fixing what's wrong, even if those errors happen only one time in three or one time in five trips, people will hate it because the tension of not knowing when or how it will fail will outweigh the convenience granted when it does work.

Are stores going to have employees trained in how to fix these things when they break? How many times can they be accidentally drenched in spilled Products before needing replacements? Eh.

I know I'm coming off as a horrible crank these days, but the main problem our tech overlords keep dumping on us is adopting new gimmick products before they're ready to ship. You wouldn't buy a car that stranded you 10% of the time you drove it somewhere, at least not unless you were a Jaguar fan. You wouldn't buy a "smart" television that randomly decided one time in ten that oh, we're gonna watch this whole show upside down today.

Our current tech fatigue comes from being assaulted by new tech that we're forced to use but which turns out to be so fragile that we can't count on it. Every time we go out in public and are obliged to use a piece of technology that doesn't work, it's a little poke in the eye that we keep thinking about long after the fact.

If you've flown on a Boeing jet lately, it's almost guaranteed that none of the doors fell off. But you heard about doors falling off, something you didn't even know could happen until it did, and now that's going to be in your brain forever.

Supermarkets are an interesting case study in what the future might bring us. They're space-inefficient. They're unpleasant just because of their size and complexity; no matter how certain you are of the list of things you need to buy, you've still got to navigate to each of those things while dodging other people trying to do the same thing. It's a task few people enjoy even in the best of times.

You could imagine some ideal future in which they didn't really exist—in which you'd make your shopping list at home, submit it, then drive to the store to pick up your already bagged-or-boxed order ready and waiting. Robots will get quite good, quite fast, at the sort of warehouse plucking that would make this feasible, though all bets are off when it comes to the produce section. Shoppers don't want to enjoy shopping, they want someone to do it for them. And deliver it for them. And pay for them, for that matter.

Nobody's shown much interest in solving the third of those problems, but the other two? They're probably a lot simpler than the shopping cart problem. The shopping cart problem is hard. Instacart has been having quite a few problems with its current model of using underpaid gig workers to solve the first two, though, so maybe "Caper Carts" are just an attempt to fully capture the "what if buying groceries could somehow come with new problems you never knew could exist" trifecta.

There's another aspect to this what if we make grocery stores suck worse phenomenon, however, and it's one that Democratic Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bob Casey poked at earlier this month in announcing an investigation of supermarket chain Kroger.

What if the prices on the shelves changed while you were shopping?

What if the price you saw for an item wasn't the same price other people saw when they walked down the same aisle before or after you did?

What if grocery stores could engage in that holy grail of retail profit-taking, surge pricing, raising the prices of soft drinks and ice cream during heat waves or the price of toilet paper when, as during the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic, consumers staged runs on the stuff?

The supermarket industry has been salivating over the prospect of implementing what's called a "dynamic pricing model" for the stuff you buy. The process becomes plausible once a grocery store has installed electronic price labels for items on their shelves; if you don't have to send a human employee out to change item prices but can do it from a central computer, then suddenly you can change prices whenever you want—and as many times a day as you want.

REMA uses electronic shelf tags to set prices centrally for its entire chain, making as many as 2,000 price changes per day. It employs a network of “price hunters” who visit the company’s stores and those of its competitors to report on prices of individual items, alerting REMA when a product is available at a lower price at a competitor’s store.

“This could be the future” of supermarket pricing in the U.S., said Planet Money host Nick Fountain, who noted that chains including Whole Foods, Amazon Fresh, Hy-Vee, Schnucks, Kroger, and Walmart have all tested electronic shelf labels.

The report noted that REMA only raises prices overnight, to minimize the possibility that a price could increase between the time when a shopper picks an item off the shelf and when they check out. The report also noted that REMA is also currently under investigation for possible price collusion with other retailers, a charge the company denied.

The industry is very keen on touting the potential benefits of "dynamic pricing" for consumers. The go-to industry examples are products with a relatively short shelf life, like produce, meats, and baked goods. The displayed prices for those goods could lower automatically as a given bin's worth got closer and closer to its expiration date; the shopper can then decide for themselves if getting a bargain on ground meat that will need to be used by tomorrow morning is something they're interested in. (Bakeries, of course, widely use this model already; it's usually called the "day-old" rack or similar.)

Slapping a digital, computer-controlled price label on the shelves "allows workers to change prices as often as every 10 seconds," which is very exciting to industry insiders but sounds like the premise of a C-grade nightmare to many of the rest of us.

It is not a luddite reluctance to change that has Sens. Warren and Casey poking at the potential implications here, however. For all of the industry talk about how making "as many as 2,000 price changes per day" is sure to be a boon to shoppers and will lead to lower prices on the about-to-expire stuff—think of the food waste that can be averted!—those particular senators are more focused on the parallel ability for stores to raise prices using the same automated methods.

The most obvious example would be "surge pricing," in which companies could respond to weather events or momentarily spiking demand to raise prices on products that consumers might most need to buy during any particular day or hour, but there are more nefarious possibilities than that one. After referencing a 2021 UCLA study that predicted the technology could "soften" price competition and raise prices," they note that a particular avenue of abuse comes when you add in the aforementioned gamification of grocery shopping.

In addition to price gouging, the EDGE Shelf helps Kroger gather and exploit sensitive consumer data. Through a partnership with Microsoft, Kroger plans to place cameras at its digital displays, which will use facial recognition tools to determine the gender and age of a customer captured on camera and present them with personalized offers and advertisements on the EDGE Shelf. EDGE will allow Kroger to use customer data to build personalized profiles of each customer, and then use those profiles “to determine how much price hiking each of us can tolerate,” quickly updating and displaying the customer’s maximum willingness to pay on the digital price tag – a corporate profiteering capability that would be impossible using a mere paper price tag.

Now that is alarming. The vision here is one of a future in which stores use technology like facial recognition or, perhaps, "smart" shopping carts that are app-linked to the phone you're carrying to institute "dynamic pricing" on a per-person level, tweaking prices as you go through the store to find the real-world price cap beyond which you, personally, will give up on buying the item at all. You can imagine this working very, very well with the gamification of the shopping experience; perhaps people who haven't linked up their personal shopping history with the shopping cart they just grabbed will see lower prices than shoppers who haven't, because through a partnership with various Big Tech scoundrels the store can make more money selling your data than by selling you cans of soup.

With that vision in mind, here comes Senator Spoilsport and allies to note that hang on here, there seems to be a new danger here that may need a few new guardrails attached.

All of that said, this does seem to be the wave of the near future, at least until everyone gets sick of it and mobs start lighting "smart" shopping carts on fire in the town square. You will go to the store, and you will collect your shopping cart with the glowing screen. As you go down the aisles, individual price tags will pop into existence. Are the same prices other people see? What's the weather currently like? Your collected data says you buy this particular item every single time you come in—what if it cost ten cents more, would you still buy it? Hmm, yes? Then what about 20 cents more?

And it's also one of the reasons that Silicon Valley billionaires, especially of the crypto- variety, have now decided that supporting a coup-attempting felon surrounded by anti-democracy fascists is far better than supporting an administration that might want to actually examine whether turning every detail about our private lives into sellable data that companies pass around with unnerving promiscuousness might be, you know, worth a new regulation or two. It's because of gamification, or the trend in which middleman and retail companies are continually using what they learn about you to scrape out every last penny from your pocket.

They wouldn't be doing it if it didn't increase their profits. Whether it's good or bad for you, on the other hand, doesn't much matter so long as all of their competitors are treating you just as badly, right?