I work in a another nationwide chain that is rolling these out. They are wirelessly connected to a database so prices can be set automatically and update within minutes. I don’t think they want to do individual pricing though and if they did they’d just do it at the register. While electronic tags would make store by store pricing easier, that has already been happening to some extent and it’s becoming less common as the industry consolidates.
What these are really for is to cut costs. The store I work at probably used to spend 15+ labor hours a week hanging tags on top of a full time employee just to audit them. The other store I used to work at had two full time employees doing it. There’s a special printer, app, tons of different little plastic hangers, and paper to print and hang paper tags. These new electronic tags are shipped in a box as they’re needed, are reusable, and are automatically updated.
That was my immediate thought as well, customer based pricing is best when hidden. People noticing a bunch of e-ink price tags refreshing with higher prices when they walk up is a recipe for disaster.
Real time updating is not fun though. That means they’re more likely to do “surge pricing” when say, people get off work at 5.
Yeah ok so it will be “exactly the same” in year 1 and then it won’t be after people have been trained to accept the technology.
Year 2 will be testing in select stores
Year 3 will be roll out nationwide
Emphasis mine.
…prices on items will be exactly the same for every consumer in every store.
Has any reporter for any major media outlet asked Walmart how price increases will actually work? I have a scenario: there’s a hurricane. Prices for water go up ~5% in nearby stores mostly used by middle-class people. Meanwhile prices go up 75% for stores with poor customers.
Retail Chains Implementing Infrastructure for Real Time Pricing Changes is a Sign of a Healthy Economy, Economists Say
These devices are used in basically every big store in the UK and much/most of Europe.
Unless they’re using some super expensive version, they still have to manually be changed, one by one, just by touching a device to it. So the difference in pricing change speed isn’t significant.
That doesn’t make sense. The devices used in European stores in the last 10+ years are all wireless. And super cheap (BLE wireless, two color, are sub 10€ for end consumer not buying in bulk, so I bet they get them for like one or two monies a pop).
It would not make financial sense to not have them wirelessly updated bcs that way it wouldn’t solve anything (the same labour & speed as regular paper labels, with wireless ones you take that job from someone).
(There do exist NFC only ones, which don’t even seem chapter, but I assume that is for boutique shops with a few labels. The benefit is that you don’t need a system or a database, just write the price via a phone app. And they cost the same bcs there isn’t much demand.)I’ve never seen a worker change the display manually, but I have seen a worker place a blank one on the rack. And I have seen them all update in sequence without anyone touching them (with the “newer” three-color ones the refreshes are more obvious).
I have only ever seen workers change the display manually. Perhaps there’s a mix therein.
My shopping day aligns with a stocking/price update day at a nearby store. Somebody with a basket of price tags and a handheld has to walk the aisles, adjust the position of the tags on the shelf to match the product facings, and touch the handheld to the price tags. I also see the price tags knocked off the shelves and sitting on the floor fairly often.
I get the reduction in paper waste but a negative for the customers is that with each delivery, the prices of items can change. So the same box of cereal you buy every week now has a lower labor cost to adjust the price by 1~5% every two to four days. (With paper printed tags, you might wait for a price increase/decrease of a certain percent before taking the time to change the price on the shelf which might take months.)
Now, in the USA there’s a silly “pricing to the 9’s” thing. So in some cases, a small change in the cost of the goods could mean a price jump higher that the few cents per item the store is paying as stuff has its prices “rounded up” to the nearest 9 cents. So an adjusted cost of a box of cereal with its retail markup moves from 5.99$ to 6.09$ instead of 6.01$.
I get the reduction in paper waste
Paper waste (even with plastics & toxic pigments) is nothing compared to unrecyclable e-waste (batteries included).
The current implementation of such tags is also perhaps a bit silly - forcing new tech to replace paper a process 1:1 is usually the initial awkward phase of a digitalisation process (instead of revising the whole system, eg smarter e-paper shelves).
Also - oh, touch the tags to tag them so the (BLE) system knows what product they represent. Yes, that is prob always the case with the initial (re)placing, especially with non-permanent items. The shelves restocking process basically (non-discount stores prob have a bit less of that).
You have to manually set what product the sign is attached to though and these signs get knocked off and broken all the time. They’re still probably saving labor over printed labels though
It’s not that much more expensive to buy networked e labels. Many of the e labels have Bluetooth support, and you connect them to an IP network via a gateway for maybe $200. Of course you need multiple since ble is low range but still. That’s easily worth is for the savings labor cost and of course also opens doors for dynamic pricing.
One of my local supermarket chains has them. The amazing thing is that you barely can read the product price. Like sure there is a price on large letters but that’s often some sort of discounted price when you buy 3 packs or something. The actual price is written in the tiniest font and since the eink has terrible resolution compared to printed labels it’s almost unreadable even if you have sharp eyes.
Walmart sucks for everything now. They used to price match so much shit. They won’t even price match stuff sold on their own website by their own company any longer, I recently found out. I needed socks for work two weeks ago. Found some on their website, and went to get them. After wading through a walmart, waiting in a Walmart line, I find out they won’t price match their own shit.
Instead I’m expected to just buy it online, schedule a curbside pickup/delivery/whatever instead of them honoring their own online pricing. I wouldn’t be surprised if other stores do this but this is a first for me.
Had this happen to me recently too. It was cheaper online by several dollars. I was like wtf. Still bought my item but it defintely pissed me off.
Hypothetically it would be interesting to get some teardowns of these devices and guides for repurposing them for electronics projects.
They seem like off the shelf products from China (with maaaybe a custom body, but they all look generic to me … and maybe a custom firmware, but that you would want to flash your own anyway), you can just order them in non-bulk.
Using E-Ink Shop Price Tag with Home Assistant - Hardware
E-Ink Price Tags Fall Off Store Shelves Onto Your Workbench
Elsewhere in the anglosphere I’ve been seeing these for a few years now and it just makes way more sense than the manual labour overhead of printing and replacing paper tags in the little plastic holders. The only kind of price variation at these stores is they change which items are on special offer each week, or seasonal variations on how hard it is to get fruits and vegetables, things they were doing anyway with paper tags. Electronic tags doesn’t necessarily mean a change in how pricing is done, but I guess with the way the world is going, some skepticism is always helpful. Don’t go all conspiracy-theory on it though.
