[krackers]

Fun read but

>Humans don’t really have the time to price-match across five competing platforms before buying a box of protein bars

No one [^1] price matches for protein bars because it's a commodity item with minimal price differences (and people often have a preferred brand anyway), but they probably do for $2k laptop.

>once AI agents equipped with MLS access

The data is the moat here, I'm sure even today individual consumers would be happy to have direct access to MLS to find properties and cut out the middleman. The fact that MLS is gatekept seems to be deliberate, so I don't think they'll hand over the only thing keeping them in business. Even Zillow couldn't get access to it and they've undoubtedly tried.

Same with the medical industry. I don't think the rent-seeking middlemen that exist today will be dethroned that easily, they have often been codified into law. But who knows maybe all the AI money pouring in will be enough to convince them to make a faustian deal towards their destruction and that'd be a happy byproduct of it all.

[^1] Edit: I erred in making too broad of a statement here, see the response threads.

[vmg12]

If I hand my shopping list to AI, why wouldn't I tell it to price match everything? People will start doing this sooner than you think. I still remember when people were scared to buy things on the internet, this will be faster.

[krackers]

Are you going to choose to buy your protein bar online from mysteryBargainBar[.]com for a $1 savings, or just pick it up as part of your local grocery trip?

> I still remember when people were scared to buy things on the internet

People still /are/ scared to buy things from Amazon for things that go on or in their body.

[riku_iki]

> Are you going to choose to buy your protein bar online from mysteryBargainBar[.]com for a $1 savings, or just pick it up as part of your local grocery trip?

1. I buy in bulk.

2. I check amazon vs walmart usually.

[jacobr1]

Yep.

ChatAI - show the top 50 online retailers by revenue in the US and note any that have credible new stories about quality control issues. Save all of them except StoreX and StoreY in your list you use for comparison shopping.

Or maybe another one, scan all my credit card purchases for all time that you have history and record all the stores.

Done. And plenty of third party sites (consumer reports, wirecutter, etc...) will do this kind of thing too. And you could perhaps transitively trust them - either view direct lists or just scraping the places they recommend.

And the average person doesn't need to figure this out ... skills encoding this will propagate.

[vmg12]

> mysteryBargainBar[.]com for a $1 savings

The AI could also research which stores are reputable.

> People still /are/ scared to buy things from Amazon for things that go on or in their body.

Sure, there are also people scared of flying in airplanes, those must be a dud too going by your logic.

[Ancalagon]

Yes from all those reputable AI reviews

[Terr_]

"Reputable" + Stochastic LLMs + Profit motive = A vast sea of poisonously false data and prompt injection attacks

[jonwinstanley]

Presumably the agents will band together on Moltbook and buld their own TrustPilot competitor? :-)

[lossyalgo]

Too bad Moltbook was written by humans, for humans: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.07432

[NobleLie]

Grok, show me the place where the least people died eating product X.

[dboreham]

In the case of the MLS example, there's also a private market (at least in some places, including where I live). Basically nothing in the MLS on any given day is attractive at the asking price. Only newly listed properties are going to be of interest to a discerning buyer. Some proportion of new listings never make it to the MLS because the agent already knows a suitable buyer.

[jahsome]

> No one price matches for protein bars because it's a commodity item with minimal price differences (and people often have a preferred brand anyway), but they probably do for $2k laptop.

This is the most "silicon valley" statement I've ever read on this website. Perhaps I'm just being obtuse and misunderstanding, but the assertion people don't price match groceries is so, so wrong. Many, many, many people have no choice. Far more than those regularly purchasing laptops.

[krackers]

>the assertion people don't price match groceries is so, so wrong. Many, many, many people have no choice

I guess I didn't quite say my point clearly, the time and physical cost to get to a grocery store puts up barriers against perfect price matching. You likely are not going to go out of your way to visit a grocery store for just a single item.

And I don't think online delivery will change anything here because shipping is a fixed cost, so price swings less than that will not change any buying habits.

[lijok]

> I guess I didn't quite say my point clearly, the time and physical cost to get to a grocery store puts up barriers against perfect price matching. You likely are not going to go out of your way to visit a grocery store for just a single item.

I think you’re a bit out of touch with the common man. People do this constantly, some to a comical degree, going so far as to make two loops on their shopping trip to return groceries they found cheaper at the next store.

[throwaway2037]

    > People do this constantly, some to a comical degree, going so far as to make two loops on their shopping trip to return groceries they found cheaper at the next store.

To go less far, it is pretty common for normies to have at least two supermarkets in their shopping list: one with lower prices and one with higher prices, but fancier goods.

[suddenlybananas]

I have never heard of someone returning groceries (unless it turned out to be moldy or something). Definitely not because they were cheaper elsewhere. Surely there would be food safety issues with accepting such returns.

[jahsome]

Step into any Walmart and look at the carts in the customer service section full of just-returned merchandise, waiting to be returned to the shelves. You might be surprised with what you see.

[lijok]

Perishables don’t get reshelved, they get binned

[bdangubic]

amazing reading this thread and realizing just how much HN is disconnected from the reality of majority of people in America. returning food and hitting multiple stores is like a daily thing for several people I know

[lossyalgo]

You may be assuming a car-centric approach to shopping, where the distance between stores is large. In cities where shops are mixed into residential areas, people often walk because stores are usually within about 10 minutes, and there are multiple options with different selections and prices.

That makes it easy to rotate: stop by one store one day, another the next, often on the way home from work since you’re taking the subway or bus anyway. For example, I buy most of my groceries at one store, and then pick up certain items in bulk at other stores every 1-3 months when they carry the brand I want at a good price (unless my usual store has a sale). Most people I know do something similar, especially as groceries have gotten more expensive, particularly since COVID.

[GeoAtreides]

>, the time and physical cost to get to a grocery store puts up barriers against perfect price matching. You likely are not going to go out of your way to visit a grocery store for just a single item.

you have never been poor (enough) and it shows

[Tadpole9181]

I'm rather well off and I'll still pay attention to the price of my groceries. Especially luxuries like protein bars. If it's too much, I'll either only get them where they'll cheaper or just outright not buy it.

It's nuts that people genuinely believe statements like this.

[threethirtytwo]

It’s an aspect of the truth. Tons of people don’t price match and tons of people do.

Whats nuts about humans is the quickness of judgement and extremity of statements. Think about this, the man who said that is not actually nuts. And you calling him “nuts” is actually the more ludicrously unrealistic statement.

[krackers]

I also did err by making a blanket statement "no one price matches for protein bars", so GP was right to call it out.

I do understand and see that there are cases in which one's time preference could be such that it is sensible or necessary to price-match at that granularity even when buying a single unit. However even then there's still other constraints such as cost of transportation & reputation of vendor.

Even today you can often find protein bars or name-brand supplements on Amazon for a slightly lower price (including shipping) than supermarkets, but that comes with the risk of adulterated, expired, or tampered products that not everyone will accept for the sake of slightly lower prices.

[threethirtytwo]

>I also did err by making a blanket statement "no one price matches for protein bars", so GP was right to call it out.

This was clearly an error. GP is right to call it out, but not right to characterize it as nuts. It's obvious what you meant.

[jahsome]

It's not that "nuts" to take the literal meaning of people's own words. Calling it "obvious" someone meant something rather than what they actually typed with their own fingers is pretty nuts though. It might be common for folks to misspeak (mistype), but that by no stretch of the imagination makes their actual meaning obvious. It's quite literally the opposite...

[Tadpole9181]

They said "no one". Not even "most", let alone "half" or "some". Those are their words.

To live in a country where tens of millions of people have food insecurity, 50 million rely on food stamps, and the median income is 40,000 while the median rent is 1,700 (20,000/year) and claim no one has to watch their grocery bill to their own inconvenience would be utterly disconnected from the reality of the survival of half of their countrymen.

Anyway, the irony is not lost that you simultaneously advocate for the parent being interpreted non-literally, by intent, but my colloquial, common use of the word "nuts" is "unacceptable".

[threethirtytwo]

>To live in a country where tens of millions of people have food insecurity, 50 million rely on food stamps, and the median income is 40,000 while the median rent is 1,700 (20,000/year) and claim no one has to watch their grocery bill to their own inconvenience would be utterly disconnected from the reality of the survival of half of their countrymen.

Stop turning this into some kind of holier than thou angle. He knows, you know we all know.

>Anyway, the irony is not lost that you simultaneously advocate for the parent being interpreted non-literally, by intent, but my colloquial, common use of the word "nuts" is "unacceptable".

It is, because it's a targetted attack. Let me put it this way, would you say what you said to someones face? Your best friend? You mother? or father and call them nuts because they said something that was off? Would you go on some holier than thou lecture on the amount of people relying on food stamps? You would? Then please continue.

[Tadpole9181]

> it's a targetted attack

What are we, children? You're acting like I insulted their mother and called the police.

> would you say what you said to someones face?

Yes, of course I would. I have. "That's nuts" or "it's nuts" is such a basic, inoffensive phrase and has no bite.

I've also said "incredulous" and "absurd" and "crazy" and a myriad of other adjectives. I've also had my arguments called those things - correctly. Maybe we keep different types of company, but when I'm having an argument/debate with friends or family, they're not so delicate we can't call each other out when one of us is being ridiculous.

> Would you go on some holier than thou lecture on the amount of people relying on food stamps?

Damn, objective facts and counterpoints related directly to the conversation are holier than thou now? I guess I forgot that when people say things diametrically opposed to basic reality, we're all supposed to just ignore it and let it go.

After all, we wouldn't want to be seen as a loon by a random guy on the internet, offended on someone else's behalf over a one syllable word that wasn't even directed at any individual, but an idea.

I mean, heck, that actually sounds kinda nuts.

[krackers]

>or just outright not buy it

Yes, but that is different from going out of your way to purchase the protein bar at the lower price in the place you can find it. You are not going to drive to another supermarket for just the protein bar alone. So there is an intrinsic stickiness. You might hold off on the purchase if you're happening to visit the other store in the near future, but would you drive to a store you've never heard of before /just/ for a bar?

[jahsome]

> but would you drive to a store you've never heard of before /just/ for a bar

Some people have no choice. Checking other stores and planning multiple trips is exactly what they do, e.g. those on fixed income, coupon power-users, etc.

Outside our comfy bubble here, there are a LOT more folks in that camp than those buying luxury goods.

[jjmarr]

> > once AI agents equipped with MLS access

> The data is the moat here, I'm sure even today individual consumers would be happy to have direct access to MLS to find properties and cut out the middleman.

Prior to agentic AI, businesses could price discriminate between human access and machine access to a database. Browser automation tools let humans arbitrage between the two but require investment in developers.

Now that Claude can browse the web, any consumer can engage in that arbitrage.

[botusaurus]

companies can also have a Claude on the receiving end to sniff if its a poor or rich Claude browsing

[nightski]

I don't think commodity means what you think it means. Protein bars are not indistinguishable from one another, there exists significant differences between various products.

[__d]

Yes, but.

When you’re broke and hungry, those differences become immaterial compared to the protein-bar/no-protein-bar tradeoff.

[rrr_oh_man]

Sounds like you’ve never been broke.

[hackable_sand]

It sounds exactly like they've been broke

[jmye]

I’m not clear what you think AI changes in healthcare, or which middlemen you mean? Is it the thousands of start-ups pretending you can use AI for better care? Or are you suggesting the middle men are the doctors?

[jstummbillig]

> No one price matches for protein bars because it's a commodity item with minimal price differences

Everyone will prize match all the time – for protein bars and absolutely everything else, when AI can do it for them for ~free, and the ai-meta-shopping experience is the best that you can get anywhere.

Thinking about this task from todays perspective misses the point: You simply won't be considering it. AI will. It's backend optimization. It just happens.

[formerly_proven]

The current AI-meta-shopping-research experience (using e.g. ChatGPT Deep Research) is largely garbage, especially for goods where the infosphere is dominated by the manufacturers and they're also using SKU-spraying, e.g. white goods. DR is of course fairly decent (if rather slow) at comparing hard-facts, but that's often easy for most goods anyway ("find me a motherboard with features X, Y, Z" goes _way_ quicker using a site like skinflint than chatgpt). Meanwhile it sucks at comparing stuff that are also annoying to compare manually. So the gain here is very low in my experience.

[jstummbillig]

How much, as a % of your total wealth, would you be willing to bet on the believe, that this experience will not be radically transformed within the coming 2 years and then also allow for ~frictionless agentic price matching?

[rrr_oh_man]

How much would you bet it will not be enshittified 2 years later?

[jstummbillig]

Anything from 0 to 100%? Depending on what you are actually proposing. "enshittified" is fairly vague.