[antiframe]

Yes, but those are per category not per consumer, which is a meaningful difference here and one you can't just ignore. Imagine a price label with a small camera that sends your facial image to a classifier of moods. Hungry? Pay 15% more. As you remove the item from the shelf, the tag reads the GUID from the item and records the price in the stores DB. Then, when you checkout, you pay that price. Someone else comes in get one price, balks, walks away. Comes back and ponders a while. They only get 5% above the base. Someone runs up and grabs and item without really looking at the tag, they pay 50% more. Now imagine that it gets it wrong half the time.

[danielmarkbruce]

Sure but they weren't trying to price per category, they were trying to grab as much of the area under the demand curve as possible. Given what was possible, that's all they could do.

There is a market solution to this - don't shop at places which do it. If I go to the supermarket and they jack up the price of bread because I'm in a rush and 40 something wearing a suit I'm likely to spew venom, pay that one time, and never, ever come back.

[0x3f]

Just seems like a difference of degree. You have n price tiers in both situations. Traditionally, the complexity of n_prices = n_customers (or even n_prices = n_customer_contexts) was too painful to be worth it. But they were always approximating this up until now. 'Categories' are just wider buckets over individualized prices.