To the editor:
Walmart is deploying them this year and Fred Meyer is testing them.
Price-fixing is illegal because it is anti-competitive. Competition is the baseline justification for this game show life. We exchange the comfort and security of a government blanket for the freedom to look out for ourselves. But a fair playing field has to be maintained. This is how you can tell the difference between slavers-in-training and actual free-market patriots.
Digital price tags are gateways to customer abuse. So is software that synthesizes and shares personal customer data between competitors — as McDonald’s is currently being accused of in court. The companies say, “Oh no, we’d never do that.” But as long as these technologies are in play, there cannot be trust. It would be like propping open the screen door and eliciting a pledge from the mosquitoes. Our only recourse then becomes individual litigation, one bugger at a time. These corporations have done that math too. They have the money and power to flood the zone. We do not, so we will always lose.
When a company engages in algorithmic price-fixing, flirts with it, pretends it would never ever happen even when all the pieces are sitting there staring at us, you can bet they’re gearing up to lie in court behind some cabbage-headed lawyers driven solely by their greedy, non-local investors. In many ways the law actually compels them to.
I’m looking at you Walmart and Kroger. Don’t think your game-playing hasn’t gone unnoticed. You really aren’t fooling anyone, you’re just bullying us because we don’t have a lot of choice. Pressing your advantage, you’ll push your customers up against a wall and rifle through our pockets. Why wouldn’t you do that? Because you’re the ‘good guys’? Well, if you say so. On the other hand, maybe you just see us as marks to be taken advantage of. Certainly your investors do. Reminds me of a particularly obnoxious beggar who used to man his post outside a busy subway station I had to use. Each morning he’d let everyone know with sing-song contempt that if they didn’t cough-up on the way out, he’d get them on the way back. He was positively a showman about it. Utterly shameless.
Luckily for us, a scaled-down WinCo (Waremart) is coming to Newport next year. Employee-owned, they don’t play games with their customers’ dignity or wallets. It’s a great store, a blast from the past when there were more human beings around.
Please join me in giving notice to Walmart and Fred Meyer in Newport that if they install digital price tags, bye bye. Litigious muzzle-buzzle, pathetic economic rationalizations or threats to eliminate discount programs … gimme a break. Don’t be so arrogantly un-American.
Just don’t do it.
— Brian Waldsmith/Depoe Bay
