Work in retail without e-ink and a lot of the concerns people have here already happen with paper. We do full store paper price tag updates daily, also someone will go around with a scanner making sure prices are up to date with website and print new sheets if not.
Normal days will consist of 3-5 new batches of tickets with the full store update batch containing normally ~10-20 a4 sheets. This isn’t a huge store either I imagine most wallmarts would have more products.
The prices already update super frequently and e-inks don’t really change that. It basically just cuts out the printing and placing, the person running around with the scanner now updates prices.
I think for workers they are nice as they reduce the chance of paper cuts and the back and leg pain from changing the 100s of bottom shelf tags.
The benefit for stores is they likely don’t need to hire as many people, less training and possibly reduced material cost over time as the paper would probably add up.
I’m not worried about e-ink price tags. Aldi has them. I’m worry if it says, use your phone to find special offers only for you.
AFAIK, they use RFID now so they must be changed manually but maybe someday, they will devise a price-gouging scheme involving face detection and tracking people with security cameras.
“Here comes this lady that always buys four cans of dog food despite the last price increase! Let’s notch it up it by another 20%!”
No they are wifi controlled
They are also IR controlled. A lot of them have a little window on the front of the unit, and an array of transmitters in the ceiling.
Probably different models for different sets. The set I work with are purely wifi. They have a light on them to blink is the only extra thing they do
IR on them does sound stupid though, in a store environment that can be blocked rather easily
In the Czech Republic, BILLA uses them and they respond to the RFID reader on my phone. It’s a different kind though, most have black-white-red displays.
Haven’t digital price tags been used for decades? I’m sure these will be more high tech, but I remember ones like this at least 20 years ago
Yeah these have existed for a while.
I think the only thing new is that walmart previously talked about actually implementing “on demand pricing” and now that they’re adding digital price tags they could actually do it.
I think this will be potentially be a good thing (at first) as you won’t have people wasting their life away just endlessly walking around the store updating the price of every individual item for 40 hours a week.
Things will get messy when they start price gouging based on current inventory, weather, holidays or emergency situations.
Things will get deeply dystopian if they start scanning customers as they enter and change the price based on their skin color, gender, clothing, or estimated net worth.
or estimated net worth
Walmart credit card. They don’t need to estimate when you willingly provide it.
Rightfully worried IMO
Can’t wait for somebody to hack them, the displays are certainly neat. Especially if they manage to add it to an existing Home Automation network without extra hardware.
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Someone will have to start a website to track item prices so we can work out when the cheapest time to buy something is.
I’m store item prices will be the next gas prices.
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It’s not just Walmart - the entire grocery sector is doing it. The potential for abuse is certainly not low.
The new labels allow employees to change prices as often as every ten seconds. - NPR
this gets into what if the price changes between pikcing it up and purchasing. They should really guarantee to not change prices while the store is open and find an hour to close and make 24hour stores 23 hours.
As noted in other comments, that certainly happens now even with paper tags - but it makes that wheel just a bit more greased…
It’s understandable given the effort required to update tags manually, but it would be nice to see price guarantees from stores (“price stable for 24 hours!”).
Lots of stores do have the price guarantees, you just need to ask someone. For example we have 7 days but you need to ask an employee for a quote first. Also I might be willing to quote a single pencil but I don’t think everyone is, its normally big ticket items or a group of things.
Paper tickets at work but change frequently. Had this happen a couple times. Since its manual we normally ask if someone updated the isle. I’ve had to respond a few times and had the ticket in my pocket still.
If there is major doubt though register price will be used, it’s not hard for someone to lie or move a ticket.
Oh also iirc there is a way to check price history to see if someone is lying so that can be used too if the store has that in the system.
Best thing for any store is to take a photo tbh since its not just eink.
I don’t really agree with this but its the way it is.
It would be a crying shame if someone were to figure out a way to force those e ink displays to refresh fast enough that it kills the batteries on those things…
It’s America, so the answer is probably “No”.
Do you not have consumer protection laws?
We’ve had digital price tags for decades. But you couldn’t do this in NZ. Stores are obligated to sell you a product at the price they advertise it for AND have a reasonable quantity of units at that price… you couldn’t sell 1 TV for $1.
So these systems would need to track what price you saw it at.
(Caveat: Our stores are still cunts and have been found to overcharge people)
Obviously the way to combat this is to organize dozens or more people who just walk around, load up shopping carts, then leave the store without buying anything. They can pay people to put everything back.
As long as they are still sending out flyers with stuff you buy you are okay. Also, if you already knew the price range of your regularly shopped goods, you know something is off. Superstore is already using digital tags. And you can just pull out your phone and take pictures.
Lastly, it should be put into law so you can’t increase price during the day. Going down is fine, but no going down and then going up again for peak hour. Stores can set whatever price they want to sell before opening. (for those non-regulated things)
New Jersey has a law like that for gas. Can only increase the price one time per day. But ut doesn’t apply to all gass stations, just ones on the highway rest areas.
@Powderhorn These have been the norm in my country already for quite a while FWIW, haven’t tested if they change these prices often or not however.
Those have existed here for a long time and we got none of those problems.
Yet. Infrastructure on this scale moves slowly and the transparentness of pricing changes on short time lines in physical stores is hard to track. It exists in emergency economies - we call it price gouging - but that’s usually quite obvious. The idea of dynamic pricing has existed forever - hotels, airline flights, movie tickets, taxi rides, even electric rates. As technology advances it offers the opportunity to use the technology to shorten the time window for pricing changes more and more. An extra two tenths of a percent profit seems like a trivial amount. Amazon and Walmart combined for more than a trillion dollars in sales last year. 0.2% is a very non-trivial $2 Billion. If it becomes available, it will be exploited.
I’m pretty sure this was in the book of revelations.
