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   Eaton (eaton@phire.place)'s status on Wednesday, 27-Mar-2024 01:12:45 JST Eaton

   in reply to

   • Cory Doctorow
   • Matt May

   @mattmay @pluralistic hah, I was with a shop that built price/inventory management software for some of the large chains, probably just a couple years after the period you describe. They were already doing it store by store based on demographics and CoL, the big stores would’ve loved to do finer grain stuff like you describe, but few had the data infrastructure to do it effectively…

   • Embed this notice
     Matt May (mattmay@mstdn.social)'s status on Wednesday, 27-Mar-2024 01:12:46 JST Matt May

     in reply to

     • Cory Doctorow

     @pluralistic e-label experiments are not a recent phenomenon. I worked at an online grocer in 1998, and brick-and-mortar stores were already experimenting with it. They were even looking at changing prices as you reached for an item. Looking at how keen you were to buy it, then making you negotiate for price by gesturing toward the item, or pulling away.

     Once consumer-goods merchandisers crossed over from B&M to ecommerce, it was already game over.

   • Embed this notice
     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Wednesday, 27-Mar-2024 01:12:47 JST Cory Doctorow

     "Enshittification" isn't just a way of describing the *symptoms* of platform decay: it's also a theory of the *mechanism* of decay - the means by which platforms get shittier and shittier until they are a giant pile of shit.

     --

     If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

     https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/26/glitchbread/#electronic-shelf-tags

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