Unless you’ve spent the last few years locked indoors and had all of your goods delivered to you — a not entirely implausible situation, given our audience — you’ve likely noticed the growing popularity of electronic shelf labels (ESLs). They’ve been a common sight in grocery stores like Aldi for some time, and major retailers such as Walmart and Home Depot have been expanding their use of the technology.
On the surface, it makes perfect sense. With electronic ink displays, you can create a price tag that looks enough like a paper label that the customer’s experience isn’t really any different, but the retailer doesn’t have to send somebody out to update the prices. Sure, the upfront cost is higher than a roll of sticky paper, but theoretically, the ESLs should pay for themselves thanks to the reduced labor costs.
It’s the sort of high-tech solution to a common problem that one of us would have come up with. If this were a decade ago, we wouldn’t have been surprised to see something like this get entered into the Hackaday Prize. It might have even won.
Now that the technology is becoming commonplace, there’s even more reason for hardware hackers to be interested in it. Since most of these tags will show whatever image you beam over to them via radio or infrared, we’ve seen a number of projects that repurpose second-hand tags as convenient data displays.
Rather than showing the price of milk, they can show the current price of Bitcoin. Or maybe you’d like to stick them up all over the house to display the weather forecast and your family calendar. They’ve been repurposed as badges at hacker cons, and at least one industrious hacker has used a discarded ESL to show an alert whenever a new episode of the Hackaday Podcast drops.
But not everyone is happy about ESLs. Recently, the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) International Union released the results of a poll showing that most American consumers are opposed to ESLs, citing concerns that the technology would ultimately lead to higher prices.
With Great Power Comes…
The rejection of electronic shelf labels isn’t just about automation taking over a job that humans used to do, although that’s likely part of it. What’s got most consumers worried is what happens in the future once ESLs are the norm. There’s growing concern that the ability to rapidly and remotely update an item’s price will enable retailers to implement aggressive dynamic pricing schemes that were previously impractical. When you don’t have to send out a teenager with a price gun for each change, there’s nothing stopping stores from updating item prices every hour.
Things get really worrying when you consider the possibilities should the ESL system get tied into other data sources, and artificial intelligence be given free rein to virtually put its thumb on the scale. It’s not hard to imagine the price of umbrellas going up when it rains, or a premium being put on a particular team’s merchandise after they win a big game.
Such practices are referred to as “surveillance pricing”, and according to the UFCW poll, as many as 75% of respondents believe that one day stores might even attempt to tailor the price of an item to the individual. Like something out of Minority Report, the price tag could jump up when it detects a more affluent shopper passing by — or at least, one with a higher credit limit.
To those who may say this all sounds a bit far-fetched, the reality is that surveillance pricing is already here for many goods and services. Anyone who’s ever booked a hotel room can tell you that the price goes up and down based on demand, and rideshare services like Uber and Lyft have never hidden the fact that they adjust fare prices in real-time. Online retailers such as Amazon also routinely offer personalized “deals” based on your shopping habits or search activity, although whether or not you actually save any money in these scenarios is up for debate.
Electronic shelf labels don’t make surveillance pricing possible, since it’s already happening every day online. Rather, it enables retailers to use those same techniques in their brick-and-mortar stores in ways that weren’t possible before.
A Double-Edged Label
As hardware hackers, we love electronic shelf labels, if for no other reason than all those e-ink displays eventually trickling down to us. But the ability to change prices on a whim and without the need for human interaction is troubling, especially when considering the pricing schemes that are already so prevalent online. For better or for worse, we’ve become accustomed to dynamic pricing when we buy things on the Internet, but that doesn’t mean we have to accept as an eventuality that the same practices will eventually come to the grocery aisle.
So, Dear Reader, where do you fall on the subject? Are you excited about the technological implications of turning each price tag into a tiny remotely-controlled computing device, or does the potential for misuse outweigh the benefits? If so, do you think there’s a path forward that allows stores to take advantage of electronic shelf labels while protecting the consumer? Let us know in the comments.
I think that may depend on where you live. I’ve never seen one (UK).
Currys use them now. They’ve been in use in UAE for years.
I was thinking the same. Whenever I see an article about re-purposing shelf labels I always check eBay and find… nothing of interest.
Maybe more about where you shop. In the UK I’ve seen them in Aldi, the Co-op, and Go Outdoors just in this last week.
Yeah, was gonna say that I’ve seen them plenty in those shops.
Maybe it depends where in the UK you live. London sometimes seems like a different country compared to where I live! (Rural almost-Midlands)
I’m in rural Cornwall, I’ve seen them in at least Co-op, and Lidl.
I’m not in London. I live in rural actual-midlands (east mids specifically), so probably not that far from you. And Cumbria where I was last week is even further from London but plenty of electronic prices labels there too.
We have them in local Waitrose UK. I don’t trust them. Perhaps they go up and down based on sales, promotions, or when they spot me coming via my loyalty card. Certainly, the technology permits this. Who knows?
I’m in the US. The first time I saw one in store was last week, unless you count the one time I saw them in a shoe store 20 years ago.
Sooooo… The first time you saw them was 20 years ago.
Agree… And I do visit Aldi and other stores and have never seen one….but what I have seen is stores not displaying the price of said object, which I find odd, idiotic and genius at the same time. I guess time will tell which one wins.
Intriguing. UK also – my local CoOp, as well as Aldi use them, so they certainly are common around me
They’re quite common in Scotland.
UK law requires anyone using dynamic pricing to display the algo parameters and the full price range possible though.
This is a surprisingly sensible law.
They are in Lidl and Aldi across the UK.
They do exist in the UK. I’ve seen them in various stores in Bristol
Lidl introduced deals that require the Lidl clubcard app, but these aren’t marked distinctly enough because the digital signs are small and limited to red highlights (Tesco uses bright yellow). There’s now a horrible pattern where customers pick up a deal, get told at checkout that the deal is fake, and either delay the queue while they install an app or, commonly, attempt to ditch their shop at the self-service checkout and leave, only to be stymied by the exit barrier which requires a scanned receipt to leave. Our local has replaced all of the conveyor belts with self-service checkouts too, except for the express checkout, so it’s no longer optimal for the big weekly shop.
Same thing with digital (or QR code) menus.
It allows the restaurant to change prices based on time or season. Printing takes time/money.
Is it a good thing to have easily variable pricing?
At least the display tags aren’t siphoning your info through an app or website link like the QR codes can/do. I automatically assume if someone wants me to use a digital app of some sort they are gathering data.
Tags are probably less harmless than the app the stores often force you to use to get coupons nowadays…unless they are scanning MAC addresses through a distributed network or something.
But yes the cameras, apps and monitoring could very easily at this point create a tailored shopping experience based on income/status. Similar to the “l’idiot” scene from “LA story” [1]
[1] https://youtu.be/6jgJhAEcq6Q?si=a4GA6i0cKSOzzbdX
It’s already happening.
Customer data gathering via BLE positioning has been a thing for well over a decade, and it’s only gotten more precise. Right now it’s unlikely pricing is hyperspecific to the individual as that would be weird to see all the tags refresh as you turn the corner down an aisle. But it’s fairly easy to track where and when the regular big spenders hit the store on the way home and what they typically buy during those trips for Uber-style demand pricing.
Furthermore, the push for online ordering and curbside pickup even for brick and mortar stores skips the middle man and goes straight to traditional online dynamic pricing per customer, especially after COVID where we were almost dependent on them while they were highly subsidized.
I’m kind of neutral on variable pricing (as any economist will tell you, the price mechanism is a vital signal that allows the market to allocate resources) but my concern with these things is that the pricing could easily be updated too often. What happens if you walk into the store with $10 in your hand, grab a sandwich at $6.99 and a drink at $2.99… and then get to the checkout to find that in the time it took you to walk from the chill cabinet to there, the retailer bumped up the price of either or both items? What price do you pay? A sale is a contract between willing buyer and willing seller; you’d agreed to buy the sandwich at the advertised $6.99 price, and it’s effectively a bait-and-switch if the retailer then demands (say) $9.99 at the checkout. I guess you’d have the option of just leaving the item(s) there and walking out without them, but that’s going to result in more than a few cheesed-off customers.
Electronic Shelf Labels are just a tool, if a business is going to be predatory against customers, the ESL is just reporting a price. Retailers can push the price to the registers whenever they want and most people would just assume they saw the wrong price and pay what is rung up to avoid conflict. The UFCW’s “poll” is from 1,000 people only, not really a good representation. They also leverage people’s feelings on the rising cost of groceries to say that the electronic shelf labels are to blame. What businesses charge, and currently often overcharge, has nothing to do with what type of label is being used. Grocery stores are fined constantly by weights and measures for having incorrect information on paper tags, why would letting them update more quickly and accurately be bad?
The whole surveillance angle is a bit ridiculous if you know how these devices work. If more than one person is in the aisle, is the ESL magically going to update (which takes a while depending on the manufacturer) to show each person a different price? No, it just isn’t a feasible thing to do
The biggest point that consumer protection advocates have a hard time getting people to understand (at least with the communications that I have seen) is that many retail laws revolve around any pricing disputes being resolved by comparing the pricing on the shelf.
(ie, in a disagreement between the register and the shelf, the posted price is used)
These existing protections completely break when the price on the shelf can be changed automatically in both places, and will inevitably be to the disadvantage of the consumer and not the store.
And realistically, why does the price for a jar of pickles need to change multiple times a day or week like the stock market? I am not in here to buy pickle futures… Just damn groceries.
If you’re trying to get an avocado or mango that’s ripe when you want to eat it, you’re basically buying futures…
I dunno, maybe if they ad a disposable vape i would be game.
They cost more money than regular labels. Therefore, they will only be deployed when they can extract more money from consumers. Thus, they are bad, and should be defaced or destroyed when encountered.
I would never steal the groceries, but these pricetags are tempting.
They make great e-waste! See openepaperlink.org
Where do you get them that they are sufficiently cheaper than just buying an e-Ink display that was meant for hobbyists, is brand new and complete with API documentation and libraries with great community support?
I was once excited about all the cheap displays that would be available but haven’t really found them yet.
Once someone figures out how to interface with them the price skyrockets. Once, you could buy a Chroma74 for $5. Now it’s $50.
“The usual places”, i.e. ebay. Currently < $10 each for the smaller displays. 4.2″ and larger are currently more expensive. I’ve personally bought several 7.4″ for around $10, but you have to keep watching and be fast on your feet.
There is a new project for epaper Displays. Open protocol and everything:
https://opendisplay.org
It is backed by the Open Home Foundation, the same team is behind Home Assistant, ESPHome and more.
I have a couple ESL at home flashed with their firmware and it works great showing data from Home Assistant. You just need a couple of Bluetooth proxies in your home.
These have been used by supermarkets in The Netherlands for years now, at least before the pandemic. Mediamarkt has been using them for as long as I can remember. They’re pretty neat and have zero problem with stores using them.
Could this also lead to instantaneous price wars between stores lowering prices?
That’d be nice. The reality is that large supermarkets already collude on this stuff. They don’t need to do rapid dynamic pricing because they have had decades of experience learning to manipulate pricing in other ways that doesn’t require that capability.
It’s also easy to detect and prosecute that sort of fast pricing change. If you’ve got a half decent competition authority (sorry USA, we know that’s not you) then they’re all over that. Here in australia our ACCC just won a big court case against one of our major supermarkets for changing the price of products up just before dropping them back down and marking them as “specials” and claiming you were saving money when the register price was still higher than before. They got caught out violating their own policies which state that products need to be at a particular price for many weeks before a special can be done against that price. Weeks. We’re not seeing instant price changes here any time soon.
It still doesn’t do anything about the blatant anti-competitive behaviour our big two supermarkets have been doing for years, but it’s a start.
Lowering?
You’re so funny.
You are so not retail :-)
Right, about that.
Electronic tags (and entire infrastructure behind these) sure make spontaneous/emergent cartels easier to form and dissolve. Once one store jacks up it prices for no good/sane/possible reason, it is just a matter of time until all stores in the area suddenly start selling same/similar things for about the same price, perhaps few cents lower to make it fly under the regulation agencies radar.
Store competition … aha, yeah, sure … price wars, aha, yeah sure … the only “wars” I see around me is “see who can charge the largest price” kind of competition. Had it not been for SOME regulations that are STILL in place we’d already see thing like average sponge bread sold for $20 (presently it hovers around $5 – SPONGE BREAD, the crappy kind that’s basically a sponge of unclear chemicals mixed in with the flour and some flavoring to make it tastes okay to eat).
Most Grocery store price wars are fought on the BUY side not the SELL side. Grocery stores operate on fairly thin NET Margins. Their price reductions are almost entirely the result of manufacturer/supplier discounts.
Surveillance pricing won’t work with shelf edge labels. With discrete sales (such as a hotel room), the interaction is atomic. You see the price and set in motion the purchase based upon that split-second.
In a supermarket, there is a disconnect between taking the item and paying for it, so you can’t link the price at the point of selection to that at the point of payment, and it is illegal (in the UK) for the two to differ.
I think the article muddles surveillance pricing with surge pricing. I’m not too worried about the former for grocery stores, but the latter is almost certainly coming. Increase the prices one hour before closing or before holidays when everyone is desperate to stock up, or just before an item runs out of stock.
I haven’t seen them for years, but there have been systems in stores that allow you to pre-scan items as you place them in your cart, using a store assigned device. Then checkout becomes a single, quick transaction. Something like that at your local Dystopian Grocers brick and mortar would enable capturing the dynamic price at the point the product is added to the physical cart, much more in line with how it could work with the virtual cart.
Nowadays, the scanner could be an app on a cell phone, which would probably not solve the fraud and loss that I think likely killed that mode of checkout. (The length of checkout time now doesn’t matter so much to the retailer since we so often provide the labor at no charge.)
Working in a mobile-scanning-heavy industry at the time, I also saw demos for RFID halos that would just scan everything in a cart, all at once. At the time, they never seemed to crack the elusive sub 5 cent RFID tag so that dream died.
Walmart Sam’s club and Costco all have this feature as part of their app and Walmart is finally starting to have more RFID tags on items so they have better inventory control
Today this is true in most stores.
Amazons “just walk out” store demonstrates the potential for that dynamic to change, and such technology will only improve and proliferate in time.
Alternatively, Walmart already has offered the ability for you to “Scan and Go” where you use your phone to scan items as you shop. When you get to t he self checkout instead of scanning all items in your cart you scan a single barcode on your phone.
If you eliminate the cashier, if shelf stocking is automated, if janitorial services are robotic, and if your shelf tags update automatically, your store labor costs start to approach zero. With the growing success of raise the wage movements nationwide, Given that the average grocery store already spends approximately half of its gross profit on labor costs, The (nearly) unmanned store is almost an inevitability
RE: “… if shelf stocking is automated …” I suspect it wont’ be long before customers would be forced to in/voluntarily shelf stock. Average store near me is still 1950s “plain vanilla shelves holding the bare amount”, and the Amazon warehouse model is about as comparable with that as Ford T is comparable with Tesla, both have four wheels and drive around.
Eliminating the cashier completely will never work, at least not in the US, and in the particular area I live. The naive vision of people picking items and paying for them … let’s refine this a bit, every store has shadow slush fund to cover the expenses of items regularly disappearing with no trace. People liberally helping themselves is actually not the largest item, it is only visible to the sensational news agencies and all kinds of lawyers liberally helping themselves with trifle crimes. Try managers and their propensity to make things disappear on regular basis, and try perfectly working display items (like large TVs) suddenly going broken and discarded; also, the returned items … and I’ll stop at that. (as a side note, close to me there is a lively shadow market that exchanges so-called “refuse” for career favors, retail store, large franchise, like, REALLY large franchise, I’ll withhold the name, since I’ve got to learn their doings firsthand by accident, oh, we are talking LARGE market, fridges, washers, TVs, food, too, some of it disappears, poof, written off the balance sheets).
Reason being, if one never works “in the industry” he/she can guess, but there are ways of trickling things out in plain view of everyone. Like MANY ways. Price tags? While at it, why not, I have YET to see a store that would suddenly charge you SMALLER price compared to the one advertised. Literally. The mistake is always in the store’s favor. Always. They’d try to sneak up larger price on you when they can. Oh, I’ve also seen interesting sight, long check-out line, some kind of sale going on, people are impatient, and I am told two prices vs advertised one, so I said, no, this IS the price, and suddenly, very suddenly, the PC magically “breaks” and poof, my purchase disappears, to be entered anew, again, this time price and a half, slowly … entered slowly … when I said “NO!” poof, breaks again, and now a manager has to be called, because “computer is broken”. Magic in the making.
Now imagine the same scenario done by actor we don’t see, they just flip the prices unnoticeable, always in the store’s favor, ALWAYS.
Cheating with the prices is nothing new. If you’ve ever dealt with traditional industrial suppliers, you’d know that the prices are either not listed at all and simply made up on the spot, or the list price is something completely ridiculous just to list some price and every customer gets a discount. You get 80% discount on the list price, I get 95%, they get 87.5% discount… depending on who’s paying and who’s cashing it in.
Don’t forget that haggling for prices used to be business as usual.
The list price is also known as the government price, because the government can’t haggle and ask for discounts. They have to follow the public tendering process, and the publicly listed prices are real prices as far as they’re concerned.
Of course then, the suppliers that don’t directly list prices will not bid 20% of what the government officially believes they must pay, even though for all other business giving an 80% discount is the default. That’s just private information not officially available to the tendering process, even though everybody knows that the government is paying 5x too much.
ESL are just great. They contain a trove of nice hardware:
– some have Sharp low-power “memory LCD”, the other have e-ink displays. Some are quite large and some have three colors. All have a radio of some kind, be it bluetooth, sub-GHz radio. If not they have at least and IR link for updates.
Many can be re-flashed with OEPL firmware, severing their dependence to proprietary gateway HW/SW, and transforming them into useful appliances.
The cheapest ones accidentally fall in the shopping cart (oops), but there are sometimes whole boxes of them for dirt cheap on eBay too. Cheap because one mut change the batteries and it is often cheaper to buy new ones than tediously change the battery and sometimes pair them to the gateway again (most have only volatile settings)
Weather board, Server / rack status, calendar, fridge memo, picture frame, meeting room reservation board… there are tons of uses.
Here in Austria we have those ePaper pricetags in almost all supermarkets since years and there are no negative issues coming up. it’s just a pricetag – they have been just printed on paper in tha past and now they are just replaced by a static electronic display. the staff still must go and reprogram every tag with a handheld device. They are not connected and can’t be reprogrammed over-the-air. They just save paper and I guess it’s less error prone (the programming device logs all tasks).
Demonizing such pricetags is just like being against electric lightbulbs in the past. It appears people are more retrogressive nowadays than 30 years ago – some just don’t keep the pace with technology.
Even if they’re updating wirelessly, it’s still illegal to switch prices up between the customer picking the item and the cashier asking for the money, so the price updates happen while the shop is closed. If you see a tag refreshing during the day, it’s probably to signal a new discount that you would get anyways.
The wireless tags have one additional advantage: if you ask the staff where something is, they can actually call the tag and make it flash and buzz. That has come handy once or twice.
A friend of ours does Spark while her kids at school shopping orders at walmart and delivering them to peoples homes. Her primary store rolled out etags late last year. She says it has made it so much easier because now she doesnt look for the items at all, she just hits the button on her spark app to make the next item flash. She says it cuts her shop times in half.
They are commonplace in Germany, pretty much every store has exclusively only electronic labels. Tbh I don’t know what the fuss is about regarding pricing. Sure, stores can change prices often but if they couldn’t they would err on the higher side to have more margin. If they can adapt pricing easily the average will likely be the same and I as a consumer can go at times where the price is lower. It would be good to require stores to actually publish realtime prices since they are all digital anyway in the same way that gas stations are required to publish their prices in Germany, then I would really have the choice. Nowadays more people are working from home and would be able to go shopping when prices are lower.
Our Walmart started switching a month or so ago. Dozens of them just sitting on shelves, easy to pickup. So tempting to pocket a few… But, they also have cameras everywhere. No way I’m putting my hands in my pockets.
Pricing, it’s what’s in the computer, and on the barcode. Likely better than sticker pricing labels. Mistakes made, or someone moving stickers to save a buck arguing advertised price. Most people pay the price scanned at checkout. Stores aren’t going to play a lot, and lose customers. Profit is from volume sales, not gouging on items. Too many other stores competing for sales on the same items. Shoppers will notice, and stop buying at scammy stores. Pissed off customers complain most. Social media gets the whining out quick, and far.
Really do want to play with some of these tags, just a little spendy surplus. Maybe wait and see. Thess complete units, and someone figuring the communication could be fun. Could change store tags to show anything, and it’s there until the store updates the price.
The problem is that for some reason the personal are not informed much about them in some shops, because if one fails it takes ages for it to be replaced, where you would think it was walking to the back and getting a new one and entering its ID n the computer interface.
Maybe all that AI agent stuff will actually be used in such environment in the future where they ask it what to do and it’ll tell them to replace it and it’ll update the db to know what it is labeling, all done verbally.
I don’t think I know a supermarket without them btw.
“if one fails it takes ages for it to be replaced, where you would think it was walking to the back and getting a new one and entering its ID n the computer interface.”
It would be nice if this were actually true of “paper tags” but in reality many stores did not have the printer that produced shelf tags, instead receiving a packet of them weekly from corporate. When a customer damaged a tag you would have to scan the product and submit it for replacement in the next weeks “tag pack”. So it would take up to a week from the time a stocker identified the damaged tag to get it replaced. Depending on the items restock frequency this could be as long as a month in some cases.
An etag needing replaced is easier as EVERY Etag can be assigned to ANY product. Labor incompetence is all thats slowing their upkeep in your stores.
For the time I’ve worked in retail, there was always a laser printer at the back office, and the tags are just paper. It would take some malicious compliance or willful incompetence to wait for corporate to send replacement tags for broken ones, instead of just whipping one up in MS Paint and printing a replacement.
No one who works in a grocery store cares enough to go through the trouble of whipping a tag up in MS paint and printing a replacement. Its neither malicious nor incompetance, its just corporate culture compliance.
That’s true. It’s more likely that you’d just write the price down with a ballpoint pen on a piece of paper, or leave the tag out entirely.
Though the reason I thought it would be easy to print the tag is because it gives you an excuse to loiter around the back office.
It’s actually surprising that shops would still get the labels printed elsewhere rather than just send a PDF to the shop and have them print it, because the cost of the logistics is pretty similar these days.
You know that employee loitering around the printer?
Thats far more expensive than the “logistics” of having your distribution warehouse printing labels for ALL of the stores they service and including the weekly tag packet in the trailer that is already being sent to the store.
Additionally you skip the expense of a printer, labels, ink, and tech support to keep that system running in a few dozen locations per region serviced by a single distribution warehouse.
I think it’s important to note that these tags are generally powered by two coin cells spot welded together in a plastic carrier which slots into the display housing. You’d need to change the batteries quite often to do surveillance pricing. On the other hand, RLCD price tags with a low-voltage four-wire bus running along the shelf would be perfect for that.
Exactly this, the article implied (and lots of comments assume) this allows for dynamic pricing and remote changes. It doesn’t, they aren’t remote at all. It’s just a very expensive (relatively) replacement for a bit of paper, which a shop worker has to come and edit with a PDA like device.
Nope. Many modern etags are capable of remote updates. They do not require a shop worker to come by. They can be updated wirelessly, instantly, in large numbers across a wide range.
“Walmart’s Digital Shelf Labels (DSLs) are wirelessly updated. They connect via wireless networks to the store’s central system and pricing database, allowing updates to prices instantly through remote, centralized management wireless system. “
Simple legislative solution: Only allow physical retailers to change prices when closed or between midnight and 2 AM. local time.
Simple in concept. But as always, the devil’s in the enforcement.
At Walmart in US this is 100% in full effect. Changing price for individuals and sort of surge pricing.
Tagged price using e-ink was one price. The price online on the App (the clerks in store will price match the online / app price which is usually lower) was $1-2 cheaper.
When we rung it up using our club member number or whatever it was even cheaper. Not complaining in that one per se but the implications that different people are getting charged different prices and that you do t really know whet the price of a thing is means you can’t shop around as much.
I vote no.
Landline phone companies use add spurious charges of a few cents. Profiting off customers who they knew wouldn’t challenge it. Today’s customers are armed with easy real-time data, apps, and community chat sites… I guess if it takes off depends on how busy, tired, or lazy any given area is? They wouldn’t roll out losing tech without anything to show for it.
If I had $10 on my pocket and was concerned about pricing. I’d snap a couple of photos of the tags. If the price changed while I was shopping I’d ask for the price or walk away
My local Safeway just converted over to these and I have to say I’m not happy about it since the chain has been taking more and more aspects of running the store out of the hands of local management in favor of centralized (opaque) decision making. The constant theme though has been that the customer experience has gotten worse and, though the store manager is aware of it, they neither know how the decision was actually made nor have any real influence going forward (so far this has covered things like having long periods of time when only self checkout is open as well as the management no longer having any say in what gets ordered and stocked) so it seems inevitable that predatory dynamic pricing is not far behind. Already they’ve moved the club diacount programs such that anyone not grandfathered in can only join via a spyware laden smartphone app =:-( so I don’t trust them at all…
if it helps drive down the price of commodity eInk displays and they start showing up in thrift stores, I’m all for them!
Aldi’s doesn’t have specials and such, just the lowest price all the time. No price wars. No psycol games.
No coupons. Poo pon coupons, that’s what pigeons do. My card at the big grocery is blank and accepted anyway, just a statistic of what sold but not me.
I like the tags in the store because an outdated price is much less likely to be displayed. The number of times I’ve picked up an item and been checking out only to find it is a completely different price is annoying. Most of the time the store will go check, pull the old price tag off the shelf, leaving nothing, and then perhaps give me the old price, but sometimes just point out the small print showing the price ended before the current date. Either way I have to decide if the time to fight is worth it or not, and whether I want the item at the new price.
I look forward to seeing these devices on the secondary market, but haven’t yet seen a glut.
Wait! A union is opposed to change? Say it ain’t so!
I see these on Aliexpress and they are always shown with a store logo or the same graphic framework. I have assumed they are screened on and only part of the area is writable or usable. Are y’all saying they are all actually completely writable? They are also rather expensive but if the full area is usable I will be getting some.
I worked at a grocery store that uses the electronic tags, and they had some really neat perks. My favorite feature was the find feature. If I was putting away a product where I didn’t know where it went, I could scan the label with the zebra gun and a light would blink on the tag showing me where the item went on the shelf. Saved a ton of time.
In terms of surveillance pricing, I am not worried about electronic tags being used for that. First of all, they are so slow to update, that it would be painfully obvious that prices were being dynamically altered for customers passing by. Even if they updated instantaneously, it would still be difficult to implement in a reliable way. And, if you quit using “the app” for everything, it will become much harder to reliably gather information on you.
Surge pricing is a different story, and I could easily see tags being used for surge pricing schemes. However the effects of that could be easily mitigated by working around the surge. My store sold TONS of bottled water in the summer, since everybody needed it for activities, etc. In this case, it would make sense to increase bottled water prices during the hot days and decrease them when it gets colder. However, there’s nothing stopping you from thinking ahead and buying a case or two of bottled water in April, when it’s rainy out and nobody’s doing anything. Same goes for the umbrella example. Buy one on a clear day when prices are low.
Surge pricing is maybe not great, but it’s definitely workable if you’re smart and can plan ahead.
US grocery store chain Publix has a policy to fully refund an item if the shelf tag does not match the price rung up. They happily apologize for the error and give up to 2 items for free and the rest changed to the shelf price. Last week bought 4 cheese rounds with ‘2 for 1’ shelf tag but rang up at full price, scored 2 free and the other two 1/2 off. I would assume the chain would have a similar policy if electronic tags are deployed.
Many stores have a policy that they will honor the shelf price if it’s lower than the price in the register.
I suspect one breakpoint for usage is how often new labels come with new plan-o-grams. If someone has to reposition, add, or remove labels about as often as the prices change then they might as well be sent in a paper label pack. That’s going to differ between store type and chain.
The strategy with dynamic pricing is the opposite of what you think.
Affluent shoppers get a discount, in hopes it will keep them coming back, and the poors get the higher price, as they are less likely to shop as frequently and you have to maximize what you can get out of them.
This is already happening in test markets in the U.S.
I have nothing against electronic labels, just as long as they aren’t used in this way.
The strategy with dynamic pricing is not what you think.
Affluent shoppers are shopping less and less and having their groceries delivered more and more.
Customized pricing on a customer by customer basis would be very resource insensive.
Dynamic pricing is far more likely to be implemented in a scheduled manner. Adjusting the prices so that people shopping right after work, during lunch hours, etc pay higher prices than those shopping during lower traffic hours. This allows the store to increase their gross sales to balance elevated labor costs incurred by the higher staff requirements during those periods.
Why would the store bother to adjust the prices down for people who come in at less busy hours?
They’re the minority of customers in the first place, so whether they pay more or less makes little difference. Keeping the prices high would not significantly lower the number of customers, and dropping the prices down would not significantly increase the traffic because most people are too busy to take advantage of the discount.
They might represent the minority of customers in number, but they often are the customers who rack up the highest order totals. Additionally these shoppers are the ones MOST likely to comparison shop multiple chains, so retaining their business is harder than those who convenience shop during high traffic periods in whatever store is directly in line with their commute.
Thermal paper’s pretty bad for the enviroment but so are these… but at least these can be reused so I just kinda feel torn.
The economics of the situation is probably that you could print 500-1000 thermal paper tags for the cost of every electronic tag, which won’t get a significantly longer life span in use, but if it saves labor on someone swapping out the tags which is less wages paid and more profit made.