How much additional labor is it to stick a new label the few times the price changes or the few times the location of items are changed, relative to programming those new prices and those new locations in a computer?
And would that add up to needing to hire even a single new employee, considering that most retail stocking is done by regular employees during their down times (it’s not like stores are gonna reprice and rearrange products on the fly during busy times).
And it’s not just the cost of a single eink sticker because they will get damaged or break down more frequently.
Are these tags connected to a network? In that case I can definitely see the appeal for chain stores where you need consistent prices across stores in multiple cities. Set the price centrally, and have it come through everywhere without the need for any employees to go around setting new tags. Given all stores are chains these days (sadly) I can definitely imagine those savings add up to offset the cost of the tags. Especially over time and considering how massive some stores are.
Yeah, they're normally hooked up to a low bandwidth network like an IR mesh or something.
Another benefit of that is that it leaves the only regular stocking left which is the easiest part to automate. At that point you can cut out the grocery department entirely and leave the 10% weird cases to the front end staff.
I wonder how that would work when the price changes. If I put something in my cart and then it rings up higher because the price went up while I was shopping I’m not going to be happy (and I assume that violates some kind of law or regulation).
I feel like you’d need to have people scan things as they picked them up to lock in the price. Then you’d need to automatically drop the price if the price goes down before the customer checks out (but don’t raise it if it goes up).
I imagine this is handled like price changes at stores that are open 24h - push out the price label changes, then a few hours later update the registers. It's unlikely that a customer will be in your store that long.
Ah, interesting point, I hadn't considered that. It seems like that would take away a lot of the power of electronic price tags though. You raise the price on the price tag and people take the product at the new price, indicating they're willing to pay that new price, but you still charge them the old price.
The real holy grail in price segmentation would be something like Google glasses that show individualized prices for each product. Then the store could do all kinds of targeted price promotion based on my buying history. Or even do promotional pricing based on my shopping trip for that day. Maybe it notices I'm about to checkout and I have hamburgers in my cart, it could offer me a promotional price on buns. Or lower the price of sale items as I walk past them without picking them up to try to find the highest pricepoint I'm willing to pay.
An edge case, but some 30 years ago or so I was told that in some supermarkets in Brazil, there could be a central display changing prices daily (due to the hyperinflation) and besides supermarkets people went shopping as early as possible on shop openings to get "yesterday's prices":
>In practice, this meant stores had to change their prices every day. The guy in the grocery store would walk the aisles putting new price stickers on the food. Shoppers would run ahead of him, so they could buy their food at the previous day’s price.
Yes, not having to reprint price tags is an example of reducing menu cost. I assume that's what you're trying to say with this context-free Wikipedia link.
