2026: Major grocers found using customer heart rate to personalise prices - higher the pulse, higher the price
this post was submitted on 04 Sep 2025
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I've heard of similar, but how exactly does this work? Does it say $0.99 on the shelf and the receipt winds up being $1.50?
I was referencing digital price labels that retailers are installing.
This technology is being touted by the companies putting them in place to be a cost saving measure as staff no longer need to print new labels and manually replace them for products on the shelf. This is true in that it is a benefit of digital labelling, however there are many other usage options that could be implemented after installation.
- alter prices around lunch hour for ready meals and snacks at retailers in walking distance to secondary schools
- automatic increases for products being purchased more rapidly than historical averages to capitalize on a yet unknown trend
- increases simply as stock begins running low
Imagine in a few years when this technology is combined with network snooping of phone identification, loyalty rewards card purchase histories, and automatic buying of customer information from data brokers, all to create a profile that predicts when a person would be likely to be menstruating and the moment they walk in the store, the hygienic products they buy every month raise in price by 30%.
It's a bleak future I'm afraid.
Good point. A US department store chain -- Kohl's -- has been using electronic shelf labels that change several times per day. Not sure how they handle the discrepancies. How do I prove the product was prices $1 when I picked it up if the label now says $2? Is it my responsibility to notice the register price was different?
I more or less avoided Kohl's, so I'm not sure how that was handled.
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Cool tech but I question it's usefulness. They focus on clinical in their language but anybody who's on telemetry orders needs waveforms not beats per minute. I care if they're suddenly in afib, not that they're a little tachy after getting up to go to the bathroom.
Well some darker entities probably would appreciate access to this tech. In order to confirm mission complete if you smell what I am cooking.
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So the tricorder in Star Trek was just a fancy, battery powered wifi hotspot??
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So how long before our phones can measure heart rate from your pocket, or being held in your hand?
It's probably possible right now.
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Oh, the person selling you medical or life insurance is gonna love this..
3 letter agencies have already been using this for cardiac signature identity verification and tracking for a long while
I am not surprised. Passive WiFi was introduced nearly a decade ago, so it makes sense that measurement systems based on WiFi have come a long way since. It's frightening, honestly.
If it could do that this whole time why did I invest a bunch of money and a whole lot more time in fancy mmWave presence sensors?? 🥲
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Isn't this no different then a sonogram