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Instacart said Monday that it will no longer allow retailers to use an AI-powered price testing program, two weeks after an extensive investigation showed wide discrepancies in the cost of groceries purchased through the platform. Effective immediately, retailers will no longer be able to use Eversight technology to run price tests on Instacart, the San Francisco-based company said in a blog post. Previously, a small number of retail partners were able to conduct testing that resulted in different prices for the same item at the same storesomething that missed the mark for some customers, Instacart said in a blog post. At a time when families are working exceptionally hard to stretch every grocery dollar, those tests raised concerns, leaving some people questioning the prices they see on Instacart, the company said. Now, if two families are shopping for the same items, at the same time, from the same store location on Instacart, they see the same pricesperiod. Mondays announcement of the end of item price tests marks the third time that Instacart has responded to a widely-shared study by Consumer Reports and Groundwork Collaborative. The monthslong investigation conducted by the magazine and progressive policy group found that algorithmic pricing might result in price differences for the same items of as much as 23%. INSTACART IN FOCUS IN D.C. Instacart responded swiftly to the concerns raised in that investigation. In a lengthy blog post late last week, the company sought to clarify what sorts of pricing tests it doesand doesntallow on the platform by responding to four different myths, including that it was engaging in dynamic or surveillance pricing. But the tech company also came under renewed scrutiny in Washington, D.C. as a result of this study. Rep. Angie Craig, a Democrat from Minnesota, demanded answers from Instacart regarding the scope and implications of pricing tests, while the Federal Trade Commission sent a civil investigative demand to Instacart about its pricing practices, as Reuters reported last week. Instacart was recently the subject of an FTC investigation regarding deceptive business practices. The company was ordered to pay $60 million in consumer refunds, though it denied any allegations of wrongdoing and answered questions from the government agency regarding its AI pricing tools as part of that settlement. REGAINING TRUST The company reiterated again Monday that it has not permitted retailers to do price testing based on supply or demand, personal data, demographics, or individual shopping behavior. Instagram ended the price testing program to engender trust with its customers. Customers should never have to second-guess the prices theyre seeing, the company said. Though shares of Instacart fell about 2% in mid-day trading on Monday, it has almost fully recouped a nearly 6% selloff that followed the publication of the price testing study earlier this month.
Category:
E-Commerce
Coinbase said on Monday it will buy prediction markets startup The Clearing Company, its tenth acquisition this year, as the crypto exchange looks to expand beyond its core digital assets business. Prediction markets let users buy and sell contracts tied to the outcomes of real-world events, ranging from elections and economic data to sports and policy decisions, effectively turning investors’ forecasts into tradable markets. Supporters say the prices can reflect collective expectations more accurately than polls or forecasts, while critics argue the products blur the line between financial markets and betting, drawing growing scrutiny from regulators. Prediction markets surged into the mainstream during the 2024 U.S. presidential race and have since drawn rapid interest and investments from all corners of the financial ecosystem. Meanwhile, trading platforms are broadening their product suites to encompass multiple asset classes under one roof as competition intensifies. This shift, analysts say, could help Coinbase reduce its reliance on crypto trading as new players crowd the market. “Prediction markets offer the company a high-engagement, high-frequency product that broadens the reasons for opening its app beyond crypto,” analysts at brokerage Benchmark wrote in a note last week. Earlier this month, Coinbase launched its prediction markets platform and said it will start letting users trade stocks, positioning it as a direct competitor to brokerages such as Robinhood and Interactive Brokers. “We see many of Coinbase’s new initiatives encouraging and incentivizing customer engagement, which has been episodically more limited,” analysts at brokerage J.P. Morgan wrote in a note after the products were unveiled. The deal for The Clearing Company is expected to close in January. Coinbase did not disclose the terms of the transaction. Among its notable deals this year, Coinbase agreed to buy derivatives exchange Deribit for $2.9 billion in May, and struck a roughly $375 million deal for investment platform Echo in October. Its shares were last up 2.6% in afternoon trading. Manya Saini, Reuters
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E-Commerce
When a major power outage left tens of thousands of San Francisco residents in the dark weekend, the citys fleet of high tech self-driving vehicles went offline too. Videos circulating on social media showed Waymo robotaxis clogging up intersections, addled by the sudden absence of guidance from traffic lights. In one video posted to TikTok, a Waymo robotaxi sporting its telltale rooftop cluster of sensors blocks a busy intersection as human drivers stream around it on both sides. This car did not move for 10+ min – it only left when the passengers ditched the car, the TikTok user who caught the footage wrote in the caption. In another widely circulated video, at least five of the self-driving cars blocked a neighborhood road, flashing their hazards in confusion. The outage also took chunks of San Franciscos public transportation system offline and disrupted local businesses during one of the busiest shopping weekends of the year. In light of the chaos, Waymo temporarily paused its service to San Francisco on Saturday evening. While the failure of the utility infrastructure was significant, we are committed to ensuring our technology adjusts to traffic flow during such events, a Waymo spokesperson said in a statement provided to Fast Company, adding that Waymo would prioritize rapidly integrating lessons learned from the weekend outage. Because self-driving cars rely on a complex array of sensors rather than human judgment, unusual or unexpected events can cause them to behave unpredictably or shut down altogether. Even within normal traffic patterns, self-driving cars like those in Waymos fleet sometimes break traffic laws and endanger other drivers and pedestrians. Earlier this year, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration opened a probe into Waymo following reports that the companys autonomous vehicles were zooming around stopped school buses, endangering children exiting the bus. An Austin school district reported that the self-driving cars continued to pass its stopped school buses, even after Waymo said it pushed a software fix. San Franciscos power outage isnt the first time that Waymos fleet has terrorized the city, which regularly serves as a testing ground for new technologies developed nearby whether residents like it or not. In late October, a Waymo self-driving car struck and killed a beloved bodega cat in the Mission, leading to a public outpouring of feline love and anti-AI ire. San Francisco goes dark More than 120,000 people in San Francisco lost power in the weekends outage, leading to strange scenes of a mostly dim Bay Area skyline on Saturday night. By Sunday morning, around 24,000 homes were without power as PG&E worked to get the city back online. By Monday morning, a handful of blocks near Golden Gate Park and around the Civic Center remained affected, with PG&E promising to restore power to those areas by 2 p.m. Pacific Time. According to PG&E, a fire in one of the power companys substations caused significant and extensive damage, plunging parts of the major West Coast city into darkness for multiple days. This is a very complex work plan and will require the highest amount of safety focus to ensure safe work actions, PG&E wrote in an update on its website. The utility company, one of the largest in the U.S., reported no injuries to its workers or city residents related to the outage. The San Francisco outage is the latest black eye for PG&E, which has faced criticism, bankruptcy and even criminal charges in the course of providing power for major swaths of the West Coast. In 2020, the utility pleaded guilty to over 80 counts of manslaughter for the 2018 Camp fire, which leveled the Northern California town of Paradise, destroying 11,000 homes and most buildings. Our equipment started the fire. Those are the facts, and with this plea agreement we accept responsibility for our role in the fire, then PG&E President Bill Johnson said at the time, acknowledging that the companys badly maintained equipment ignited the deadly blaze and erased a rural California town from the map.
Category:
E-Commerce
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