Yes, a lot of it exists to squeeze a bit more of a margin out of the business, but come on. The alternative isn't going back to the Middle Ages, it's shaving 0.1% off the profit margin. It's OK to wonder if the risk is worth it.
The increased profits that have occurred in recent decades have landed with the big food companies, not with the retail chains selling their products at very little margin.
They did promise to increase the cost of breakfast a couple years ago.
If only…
Which apparently why after >2000yrs of effort from both sides we now, finally!, have locks that no lockpicker can compromise.
Vulnerabilities will always exist. Systems will always be hackable. You solve the problem by patching what you can, and cleaning up after what gets exploited, if and when it gets exploited.
You must not mean what you have said here. If so, you are double-dipping.
I would be interested to know what the damage caused by this attack is compared to savings over a system where thermostats need to be adjusted on-site.
But more to the point, there's plenty of grocery stores that ask 20% more than their competitors and are doing just fine; in fact, constant price changes and promotions make it impossible for consumers to really compare if Safeway is cheaper than Whole Foods, so people usually go to the place that's physically closer, has better selection, or better vibes. I can't even know if a 12-pack of Coca-Cola is going to be $6.99 or $9.99 today.
Maybe we throw it all away and go to 1990s-style grocery chain management, hire a bunch of people, and costs go up while reliability and monitoring shifts to humans. But that doesn't mesh with consumer expectations on price, which is probably how the whole system originated.
Further, once you have hundreds or thousands of devices, “just call someone to turn it up/down/off” doesn’t scale.
And yet, somehow it did scale just fine for a hundred years before we hooked everything up to the internet.