The extension of this idea into supermarkets is, however, what truly worries me. As Steve Keen and I discussed today in our podcast/video, the risk of potential famine, including in the UK, is high right now.
Famine? Jeebus.
It is easy to imagine where this might be most easily achieved. I suspect, in view of the current uncertainties over petrol and diesel supply, the likelihood that these will be subjected to dynamic pricing quite soon is very high indeed. We are already used to the price of these products changing regularly,
And, so, pricing which changes is a disaster because we’ve already a system in which prices change?
The reality is that we are very likely to need food rationing and price controls this year to ensure the supply of essential items to everyone in the UK.
Wholly flipped.
even in a country such as the UK, where there is a high likelihood of there being sufficient food to go around if properly allocated,
We can imagine who will be doing the allocation here, can’t we? As with the Soviets – the party vanguard will require higher rations given the importance of their work.
a reliance upon rationing by price would represent reckless irresponsibility on our government’s part.
But price is the efficient method of rationing. Both by people reducing demand – no, it is not possible to state that every calorie currently eaten by a Brit is necessary – and also by increasing supply. Potatoes rise in price, more people plant potatoes in the back flower verge. And yes, everything happens at the margin…..
As with the Soviets – the party vanguard will require higher rations given the importance of their work.
As, no doubt, will ethnic minorities because of their special dietary needs.
The gammons will just have to make do with government gruel…
Turnips! Lots and lots of lovely turnips.
A turnip of my own in the country.
Get ready to haggle.
The trouble with some prat spouting on about food shortages is that it panics people so they panic buy and this causes shortages and rationing may be needed.
Yes. Sounds like “misinformation”. Jail the bastard!
The defining quote
As I have recently argued on this blog, equality of provision, meaning that everyone is guaranteed access to the essential goods and services that they need to ensure that they can live free from fear, might be both the best definition of equality that we can have and, simultaneously, one of the best indications of the duty of government that is available
Who on Earth would define what ‘essential goods and services’ are? Are we going to send in police with warrants to clamp down on perceived ‘hoarders’? Who will monitor X for ‘Transphobia’ if that happens?
Has there ever been anyone with less practical ideas anywhere in the blogosphere?
Quite a few, actually…
Of course, *those* peeps are lunatic crackpots, whereas the Elyan Sage benevolently shares his Wisdom to the Masses, as befits a Great
ProphetIntellectual™.A recent poll reported that 36% of people in the UK (well, 36% of the allegedly representative sample) regard private health insurance as essential: for them it is so that they can live free from fear that the NHS will let them down. Does Murphy regard it as a duty of government to guarantee access to private health insurance?
If so, what does the second ex-Mrs Murphy think about this?
Agreed, but:
…less practical ideas…
‘Less’ is for uncountable, singular, or bulk measurements (time, money, distance) while ‘fewer’ is for countable items (plural nouns) – like Spud’s ideas.
Sorry for the ‘pendantry’, but it grinds my gears…
…unless the less refers to the practicality, not to the number of ideas…..
It is the latter, referring to the practicality of Murphy’s concepts rather than the number of ideas. However, Theo, my grammar could well be faulty!!
I wish there was some system to dynamically price the cost of government. When demand is low, there’s no recession war or plague then the cost comes down, fiction lending libraries get sold, benefit increases from the last crisis get reversed, winter handouts stopped, farmland owner subsidies get canned.
It’s almost a Keynesian thing is this dynamic pricing. Just never been tried.
Well, that’s what elections are supposed to do, but we find that few people voluntarily disembark from gravy trains.
So Pinochet should have thrown people out of gravy trains instead of helicopters?
At speed, perhaps. The problem then is, er, “debris”.
As Tim has pointed out a few times, democracy is accepting that one can be ordered to disembark from your gravy train (but that is only for those elected and their teams).
Ah yes, but the first order problem is to get people to vote for you if you intend them to disembark their gravy train, and they know it.
Hence the large residual of votes for Labour. 6.19 m employed in the public sector, 0.9m “economically inactive” plus those dependant upon public sector employees but not included above pretty much accounts for it.
Blame the voters. They take scant interest, let politicians keep pissing money away and only care when shit finally hits the fan.
I realised this in my very brief, failed political career. Stood once for a local election, got 23 votes. Karl Donitz and Pope John Paul I did better than I did. But the value of it was knocking on doors and talking to people.
And fuck me, most of them can’t think beyond next week. They were all supporting lockdowns. “so, you’re OK with the debt that this is causing?” “What do you mean?”. What do I mean? That paying people not to work creates debt, which has to be paid for by someone, and it’s going to be you, you muppet. So they all wanted lockdowns, then got pissed off when Rishi raised taxes to pay for it.
I reckon it’s part of the whole solar energy thing. Most people haven’t dug down, or are just incurious about the intermittency problem. They’ve been told it works, and that we can just use batteries and gone “OK”. It’ll all fall apart when reality hits. It’s like Madoff’s Ponzi scheme. Everyone gets told its legit, and it works, until it runs out of money, then shit gets real very quickly.
Furlough payments are a different (but not separate) issue from lockdowns. I did, and continue to, consider that Sunak was right (morally) as well as correct (politically) to make furlough payments out of the government’s coffers to people who were forbidden by the government to work: I realised at the time that the cost thereof would have to come out of my savings and the savings of people like me.
I did not get pissed off when Sunak raised taxes to pay for it. I did get pissed off when Wilson raised taxes to pay off the miners for striking to wreck the Heath government.
Oh! Where I should have been the *most* pissed off if I hadn’t been wearied by previous evils was Rachel Reeves raising to 120% Gordon Brown’s 100% tax on small occupational pensions.
There is no government coffer. It’s our money. Beyond that, it cannot be morally right to steal money from other people’s children and grandchildren to support an immoral and thoroughly stupid policy. Politics – that’s for wankers.
Apparently he never said it, but it’s too good not to use:
In a similar vein, I recently came across this and thought about Burke’s letter to the voters in Bristol and then I thought about the quality of modern politicians and with a few honourable exceptions I’ll bet most have only heard the word burke as a term of abuse.
Though I understand that Winnie did say ‘Democracy is obviously the worst possible form of government, except for all the rest.’
That aphorism is being rather tested to destruction by most of the democratically elected governments of the West at the moment. The very fact that hundreds of thousands of people are moving from the West to autocratic theocracies in the Middle East suggests that the lure of democracy is fading somewhat. Wealth, security and no votes are proving to be of more value than high taxation, social decline and a vote.
A malign aspect of government is debt. Debt allows a government to create freebies to voters without them immediately seeing the impact. It’s necessary for some things, but in general we should spend from taxation.
We should also avoid government investing in things, as that just allows the real cost to be lost. If we want a road, let a private company build it, and just pay them a fee per vehicle to run it. If we want a bus service for little old ladies, offer Stagecoach an annual subsidy to run it.
God knows what George Osborne *A CONSERVATIVE* was thinking when he undid the bus reforms. You know that local councils running their own bus companies will become flaming pits of money as they invest in all sorts of bollocks like electric buses.
Berk is the term of abuse – rhyming slang = Berkshire Hunt (so should really be pronounced ‘bark’ but never is!)
For the solar energy thing, it doesn’t help that the government uses groups that lie for their cost estimates.
The group the politicians use when saying it’s cheaper than fossil fuels comes up with estimates that are something like 1/3 to 1/2 the actual costs when those come in.
The reality is that we are very likely to need food rationing and price controls this year…
And when his food rationing and price controls do not materialise, what will this hysterical loon say?
Oh, he’ll be on to the next thing.
There’s a reason he seems to write about three pieces a day – if he writes enough, and he varies his output enough, it’s hard to pin him down. Was he wrong in piece #1 on Tuesday? Well, he contradicted himself in piece #2 on Wednesday and piece #3 on Thursday. So which does he now mean?
The only constant is that he be appointed the fat controller in charge.
“To each according to their needs; from each according to their abilities.”
What a lovely idea. So fair; so rational.
Who decides, on the basis of what information, and what are the consequences for the decision-makers if they decide wrongly?
Not lovely at all. It’s how you treat slaves or battery hens.
Which makes him giddy as a school girl. He’s FOR it. He dreams of allocating food to the proles, then cutting them off.
Commies take over the food supply. Give it all to their friends. Production stops. London is a ghost town in a month.
Yeah! Glückliche Zeit.
It’s the marginal value thing that he misses. Fuel rises and there’s various uses of it that you can do less of first. Maslow’s Pyramid of Needs and all that. Like Mrs WB will sometimes go to Marlborough for some food. There’s an excellent butcher there, a few speciality shops. Lovely stuff. Uses about load of fuel to do it. But it’s a luxury. We aren’t going to starve without dry cured bacon, celeriac remoulade and Tracklement’s onion marmalade. Lots of people get in their cars and go to country pubs for Sunday lunch. Or have a nice weekend in the Cotswolds.
It’s the perfect excuse for Beeching II. “Look, we need to temporarily stop running all these rural trains that hardly anyone uses because of the diesel cost”. Then just don’t bother re-opening them after.
Beeching II sounds like it would make far too much sense for this government to ever implement.
Because then it would be pretty obvious (at least to the people who bother to look) just how far off reality most mass transit planners are. Especially the ones who are mad for trains of all types.
we are very likely to need food rationing and price controls this year
This is a great idea! I hope Sir Keir tries it, because those lampposts aren’t going to decorate themselves
It’s what C Attlee did, with the result that 1) his party was out of power for a generation; and 2) he’s revered to this day as Labour’s greatest ever leader.
Yes, the likes of Spud appear to have forgotten that the UK public is no longer the homogenous mass of largely law abiding white Judeo-Christian types that put up with the last lot of rationing. The New Britons are not going to sit around quietly while some Polly Toynbee Lady Bountiful type in local government doles out ration cards to them and they can no longer get Uber Eats whenever they are a bit peckish. And that they are quite a bit more riot-y and ‘Give me what I want, or I’ll stab you’ than Arthur Higginbottom of 35 Acacia Avenue ever used to be.
As you say, it would be fun to watch, just as long as you don’t live in any sort of urban area.
If he bothered to look, he would be able to see that the prices of the two most traded food stuffs, wheat and rice, are now below the level they were before this whole Iranian kerfuffle started
That would mean actual facts interfering with his Sagageous Musings… Requiring to be actually included in the conlusions..
We all know the answer to the likelyhood of that happening…
Supermarkets could introduce “dynamic pricing”, allowing them to increase the cost of goods when demand is high, the Bank of England has warned.
Consumers are already used to such pricing methods when they use Amazon, Uber or buy tickets for flights or concerts. But it could now become commonplace for even the most essential items, such as food.
Yeah, that won’t work. Supermarket shoppers pay close attention to sticker prices and hate, hate, HATE, seeing those prices inflate every time they go shopping.
Now tell Mum the cost of a loaf of bread is (???) depending on what time of the day. No, your customers will just murder you for that. Women won’t accept it. They’re gatherers, not hunters. Supermarket shoppers have put up with a lot of shit over the years, such as charging for bags and the self-service checkout bollocks that makes shopping less convenient than ever. But they won’t put up with airline style pricing for essentials. They’ll go to Lidl instead.
We already have dynamic pricing ofc, it’s called the market. It’s just not a good business idea to dynamically adjust the price of a tin of beans on the regular in the way Ritchie is imagining if you want shoppers to keep coming back. People don’t want the eBay experience when they’re buying food.
We had this in the crisis of, what, 1973. Staff going round the store with pricing guns, putting up the price as you watched. As I recall it was banned. Once stuff was on the shelves it couldn’t be marked up. All the stupidity currently postulated has happened before. It doesn’t work and people don’t like it.
Another thing I remember from those days is index-linked pay rises on a monthly basis for the public secter. I was a squaddy then and there was a formula governing it, so many pouds per percent of RPI. I can’t find a reference to it now. Can ayone link me to it? Would be around 73 or 4, Heath was PM, I think.
I thought it started for us in Jan ‘73 but like you the memory fades.
My unit chose that time to do away with pay parades, cash for current and next week changed to paid into your bank four weeks in arrears. Six weeks to get by on two weeks’ pay. That, children, is how boomers had it so much better.
Well, you must have had it a lot better than most people through most of history.
Unpaid troops were the cause of most mutinies after all. How many mutinies happened as a result of this change?
I’ve been in supermarkets on the Continent where the prices aren’t on paper labels, but on little LCD screens. Don’t know whether they can be changed live during the day, or just overnight.
They can be changed live. A number of convenience stores near me have them – the main saving is in staff costs, with no need to print and put on the shelf paper labels on a weekly basis. They haven’t (yet) been used for dynamic pricing.
It really just isn’t worth the bother. Dynamic pricing happens when there’s considerable variation and large amounts. London hotels can sell a toom 100 times over on New Years Eve but a Sunday in February hardly anyone wants one. It’s worth the time and effort.
But bus tickets are fixed. Cinema tickets are fixed. Restaurants might have midweek discounts, but they don’t bother with adjusting for Wednesday instead of Thursday even though I’m sure they’re slightly busier on Thursday. It costs to do and adds unnecessary complexity to purchasers.
The other thing is that supermarkets would have to do a load of work to make it happen. Till systems run on a client-server setup. Overnight, head office sends price updates to a store server, and that sends prices to the tills. It makes scanning faster and also, if the line breaks to head office, the store still runs. Tesco would have to make that a more frequent update. It may be that the till system has to stop working to do an update. Someone has to do that project, test it, and by the time it’s done the crisis might be over.
Yarp, makes sense for things where the costs are highly variable on a day to day and case by case basis like airline tickets. Otherwise more flights would run at a loss, hastening the end of the industry.
Doesn’t make sense for beans. Heinz isn’t going to suddenly start charging wildly variable prices for a tin, the supermarkets already paid for the stock you buy in store, there’s no actual risk of them selling at a loss unless they deliberately price it so.
I can imagine board members potentially being dumb and greedy enough to fall for the sales pitch from whatever vendor is trying to sell them dynamic pricing software. I just can’t see them getting away with it when customers find out. Wrong business for that approach.
Airlines and supermarkets are utterly different businesses. Airlines sell you just one thing – a seat for your bum while you fly from A to B – at up to four different levels of niceness. The fees for the small range of unbundled extras such as seat choice, extra legroom, checked baggage etc. change slowly.
Supermarkets sell thousands of different kinds of products, each with differing lead times, shelf lives and rates of turnover, to multiple sub-demographics.
It is foolish to expect BoE staff to understand any of this, just as they can’t understand Claude Codex.
It’s really the variability of demand that’s the big thing with airlines, hotels etc and that so much of the cost is static.
Lots of people want to fly to Milan on business, and you can sell a ticket for £200, but you’ve paid for the plane. Why have this expensive asset sitting idle on a weekend, though instead of making £40 from someone who wants to go to the opera? You might only see a tiny profit from the weekend but it’s still profit.
Supermarkets have things with variable demands like easter eggs and charcoal, but they don’t have static costs in the same way.
Like there are ways to use Amazon AWS to do compute cheaper at certain times of day. In the middle of the night, not many people are doing their shopping. But the servers are still there.
Yes. Once the airplane door closes, an empty seat gets you zero revenue. At most you have extra fuel. Which you’ve paid a bit for because you’ve carried it with you instead of loading it at your destination. Filling that seat is worth a steep discount, though you do have to avoid setting expectations that the seat should be that cheap.
Supermarkets tend to handle variable demand by stocking changes. Try buying Easter eggs in June, you can’t because the demand is so low they won’t waste shelf space on them.
Which is also why you can find lots of stuff at Amazon you can’t in any local shops. A warehouse shelf is much cheaper than a store shelf, and if you’re selling to the whole country you might actually get enough demand that filling a warehouse shelf with Easter eggs in June is worth it.
“… the supermarkets already paid for the stock you buy in store…”
More likely, they might pay in 180 days time if the supplier is a big enough one to bully them. Otherwise longer, and probably hassling for a discount all the time, threatening to put your stuff out of sight on the bottom shelf, and so on.
Judging by how long it took them to replace a totally crap update (2 1/2 years) of their scan system, I’m not holding my breath.
In my area we do have cheaper cinema tickets on Tuesday.
How much cheaper has varied over the years, but it’s adjusted maybe once a year at most. Generally when the regular prices change.
“Happy hour” has been up and down over the years. There was a period where the anti-alcohol people were complaining that it was causing drunk driving, so they managed to push through a measure where if a place lowered its prices for booze it had to keep that same price until closing. Which had the effect of removing happy hour. Until the measure was repealed or modified, since I see discounts have returned.
Yes, dynamic discounts seem like a really bad idea (big surprise). Imagine sitting down to a restaurant meal and ordering from the menu. Then you get the bill and the prices have increased because you took a while to eat.
What happens when the price goes up in between you taking it off the shelf and getting to the checkout?
I suppose it goes up – legally the shelf price isn’t a contractual offer, so you’d be given the new price at the till and given the choice of whether to accept it.
Going to cause a lot of faff though, as people reject items that have gone up too much and they pile up by the till.
More likely that they get sued by lots of people who say ‘This item was displayed on the shelf at X, but the till charged me 2X, I want compo’. I would say that the displaying of the price at the shelf was indeed some sort of enforceable contract. If its not for sale at the displayed price, what price is it for sale at? I can’t see courts letting large corporations get away with saying (in effect) ‘We’ll tell you what the contractual price is when you’re actually buying it, and not before.’
The concept might fly if it didn’t change within shopping hours, and prices changed day to day rather than hour by hour. Ice creams get put up overnight when a hot day is forecast tomorrow, or beer costs more when England are playing in a world cup game the next day, that sort of thing.
My local big Tesco seems to have someone waiting around in case someone argues about the price with the cashier and she then goes and reads the price label on the shelf: with dynamic pricing they would need to have that someone sitting in front of a screen showing when the last price change was for that item – probably several people and that might cost them more than they got from dynamic pricing.
“the self-service checkout bollocks that makes shopping less convenient than ever”
They are a complete pain, but they are largely being superseded by the hand-held scanners, which are great because you don’t have to take all your stuff out of the trolley at the checkout.
I ended up swearing at the self-service checkouts when they were introduced, and even abandoned a trolley-full of shopping once in Lidl in frustration at the damned thing, when they didn’t have any actual people on the tills. But I haven’t had to use one for ages except grabbing a couple of things in the Sainsbury’s at Waterloo.
For some reason Lidl doesn’t have them yet (too much risk of thieving?), nor do the mini supermarkets (they work best with trolleys, not baskets), but everywhere else they’re actually easier than the old till with an actual person.
A market- and technology-driven solution, no government involvement, so it works.
which are great because you don’t have to take all your stuff out of the trolley at the checkout
How do you bag it?
Scan and bag as you go, then scan a barcode on the till that downloads your shop to the till to pay. My preferred way of shopping every time.
Thx. I’ll use that if we ever get it here.
You zap it with the scanner as you shop and put it straight into the bag. As I said above, it works really well when two of you work as a team.
On the self scanners, I’m wondering if the technology has improved over time or whether I’m getting more skilled at using them. I find them very quick and easy now and generally quicker than the manned checkouts.
It hadn’t occurred to me that you can grab a handful of bags as you enter the store and have them ready. New paradigm.
You have to take your own bags to the store, the supermarkets aren’t allowed to give away free bags anymore.
Scanning has generally improved. Higher definition cameras, in particular.
Scanning software is looking for an edge line, and once it finds it, it can figure out its angle, rotate the image and reads it like binary on/off. But it also has a structure and a check digit. So, if a line is misread, it won’t be right because the checksum won’t be right. The better quality the image is, the fewer errors you get.
If you ever look at a QR code, you’ll see 3 square boxes. Those are about rotating the image in multiple dimensions. Not just like a barcode, but also adjust for the skew. So you can pack 3 dimensions into them. The company that created them gave the invention away. They sold barcode scanners and wanted it to be adopted as widely as possible.
I think there’s also a change in the people maintaining the scanners.
The biggest problem with scanners not recognizing codes is when the front glass is gunked up. Cleaning the glass more often fixes that.
As long as you don’t have to download an app to your phone to do it.
I’m vaguely surprised at the tales of how difficult self-scanning is. I very rarely have problems.
Admittedly I’m a single fit man living alone. So my weekly grocery shopping fits in a basket on my arm, and I don’t have problems passing it across the scanner.
Perhaps if I had to scan a full cart there’d be more problems. But my local grocery store has self-scanning only for baskets, if you have a cart they still have cashiers. Some people take carts into that area anyway, they’re annoying because they block traffic.
Yes, I think self-scanning implementation has been slowed down due to theft.
“…the self-service checkout bollocks that makes shopping less convenient than ever.”
If it did then people wouldn’t use it. When I go to check out I look at the lines at the regular tills and if there are any I go to the self checkouts and I’m away before the people I would have been queuing behind. When wifey and I shop together I use ‘Scan And Go’, she hands me the item, I scan it and bag it, no checking out, just pay and leave.
How typical of Spud and the left in general:
You cannot hate these people too much.
But BiND, he doesn’t propose solutions.
It’s scandalous that so much fuel is wasted by the rich on frivolous pursuits such as boating on the Norfolk Broads. This pushes up demand and the price of fuel required for essential use like driving to the countryside to watch birds.
Save this post as a text file. Submit it in his comments, Dec 31
Yes!!!
I am pretty sure he typed all that with one hand;)