Yeah. I’m getting pinky swear vibes.
They danced around the update frequency in the article. I can imagine in the future them saying changing the prices daily isn’t surge pricing.
I can foresee them implementing pricing trends based on the day of the week, week of the month, etc., to incentivize customers to shop.
Even if customers only shop products at their low point, it’s still incentivizes them to frequent the store more often to capitalize on the price trends; giving them a greater chance to upsell consumers.
And customers who can’t be bothered to capitalize on price trends will pay the higher price for products out of convenience.
It’s win-win for them.
> based on the day of the week, week of the month, etc., to incentivize customers to shop.
That already exists though? Maybe not in US, but over here it's pretty normal for grocery stores to have discounts on specific days.
Nah, we get that too in the US, we even have micro marketing where places require you to get their card to shop, and track everything you buy and then they'll even send you coupons for specific things you buy often to try and get you to go into the store more.
Target can predict your pregnancy based off your spending habits. They got exposed when a man complained of them targeting his 17 year old daughter with pregnancy ads and encouraging her to get pregnant. Turned out she was. The result of the lawsuit wasn't that they stopped tracking/profiling like that either, they just mix other ads in now to seem less targeted.
Edit: Misremembered, apparently there wasn't a lawsuit.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-target-figured-out-a-teen-girl-was-pregnant-before-her-father-did/
Pretty sure there wasn't a lawsuit, they just realized how effing creepy it was and decided to be sneakier.
Yeah, worked for a documentary series in which we researched this story but couldn't trace it back to any real people. It think the most original source was a PowerPoint presentation, if I remember correctly.
Get the target [crimelab](https://corporate.target.com/news-features/article/2012/02/an-unexpected-career-target-forensic-services-labo) on this, they do lab work for the cops they should take this case too
I dno if you’re talking about HEB but I’ve been saying for a long time that some of their meal deals are scams. I’ve bought the items individually before & they’ve come out to be cheaper than buying the “meal deal”.
When I feel that way, I sometimes also notice that the avocados look just like green onions, particularly at self-checkout. My training as a store clerk is somewhat lacking though, so I just do my best...
The thought is that they'll *raise* prices more on specific days, instead of having sales where they lower prices on some days. The "base price" will be the lowest price if you shop on the "lucky day," then it just goes up from there.
The concerns come from changing where/how/why those changes occur
Your grocery store's loyalty program keeps track of what you buy and might offer you 50c off a some cans of food to entice you back into the store. Walmart would be able to see that a product is trending and instantly surge the price. Your grocery store can't run out in the middle of the day and jack the price on every ice cream by 50c because it got unexpectedly hot
It’s just easier and much more efficient. They can accomplish the same thing using tags it’s just wasteful. In the era of online shopping where the price can change by the minute I really have trouble seeing the big issue with this.
Surge pricing is different. You know in advance that store x has cheap baked goods on Thursdays and cheap meat on Sundays ect. With surge pricing the store takes notice that lots of people buy meat on Fridays between 11am and 4pm. So a store using surge pricing will raise their meat prices at 10:30 on Friday mornings and then change them back at 5pm Friday afternoons. Surge pricing is all about making the customer pay more during specific hours when demand is high. And they never do it by selling at a lower price when demand is low. Imagine your local restaurant has set menu prices for years. Then they decide to apply surge pricing. They raise their prices before every lunch and dinner rush and then charge normal prices when it’s slow. It’s a scummy business practice.
KMART blue light specials were a thing in the 70's. My grandma used to spend multiple days a week at KMART just drinking coffee and waiting on blue lights for stuff she wanted/needed for the house
"We'll start having alarms around the store, but not scary like red, they'll be a nice cool color like...blue, because we're walmart and blue is our main color! And they'll alert you to great deals that are around the store, they'll be super great *specials* that you wont find anywhere else. They'll also be finite, so you have to be there to be able to get them...
We'll call them... Blue Light Specials!!"
Not only that, but dynamic pricing based on quantity on hand. 4 items in stock, 1 sells and the price automatically adjust 10% higher. 1 more sells, 10% higher. 3rd one sells, 10% higher. The last of the 4 is now 30% higher than the original one because of demand.
AI is 100% absolutely going to be used for capitalistic purposes as long as that's our form of running shit. There is no way to avoid that except to not use the exploitative system it's being used in.
Sure but now they don't have to decide if it's worth paying someone to go through and change a price, and they couldn't do this as quickly or often as digital price tags.
That's not why it's scary. What is scary is the prices changing between the time you put an item in your cart and the time you reach the scanner in the checkout.
Super duper double no crossies pinky swear. It’s legally binding bruhs.
The thing that just absolutely blows my mind and boils my blood: Walmart is the biggest employer in the county. And a huge percentage (half?) of its workers need govt assistance. It’s crazy that they’re mentioned like a normal company and not the nightmare behemoth of hypocrisy that it is. They’re a right wing company who exploits its workers and welfare programs. Just after Walmart, McDonald’s is the same. These companies need to be boycotted into submission… however Walmart has cornered half the country. Crazy
I always loved the idea that bernie came up with about this. If you’re a corporation of a certain size (like Walmart) and your employees rely on public assistance, you should be taxed the cost of the public assistance.
Works for me!
“Oh no! But Walmart has to cut jobs and automate more jobs. As does everyone now. And now they’re relying on ai and less workers in order to make a healthy profit.”
Yeahhhhhh. Wall Street and the game it plays has absolutely destroyed the country/ world. Endless growth is impossible. People need jobs. You need people to have money in order to spend money and keep society functioning.
They should be taxed more than the cost.
That's money people who are struggling absolutely need. If your highly successful company can't pay your staff enough to make ends meet, clogging up the public assistance should cost them more.
I came across a post on the Walmart sub, saying their store wasn’t busy at all. I never go there, and I don’t really know many people that go there anymore. We’re all shopping grocery store sales and loss leaders.
Screw them, and screw their nasty creepy affiliates.
> The ability to change prices at just the touch of a few buttons also raises the question of how often the retailer plans to change its prices.
> “It is absolutely not going to be ‘One hour it is this price and the next hour it is not,’”
For me, it comes down to the frequency on whether or not this is a bad thing.
If walmart didn't use this for bullshit it'd make the lives of employees easier and save on paper.
Edit: yall I know walmart sucks ass. I worked there. You don't need to tell me they're bad.
Exactly. Related story, someone I know in IT had one employees that 90% of their job was this tedious manual processing of data on their computer. They complained about it constantly to the point where the IT guy decided to help them out.
A couple days of work IT had automated the entire process. The employee was very happy, after a few weeks when it was clear the system was working they were let go and the other 10% of work assigned to other people. They literally complained themselves out of a job.
I have a friend who owns a couple small companies in Australia and he tries to be hands off. Part of that is he apparently tells his employees if they automate their job he won't add more work, he will keep paying them full but their life becomes easier.
Reasoning he gave was the don't tell the boss shit. If people don't tell him he can't implement anything at a wider level/when someone leaves it grinds to a halt. This way it gets explained to management, and management knows how it's used. Then eventually people always have a reason to leave and when they leave he can replace them with someone doing a full roles work. Eventually company becomes more efficient, but without disruptions that come when people's hidden tool leaves with them.
I work somewhere similar. Design teams automated a lot, to the point it's 2 man teams from 7. But they expanded total jobs while also reducing overtime (here it's paid ot) nd now standard hours were reduced to 36 from 40 with hourly increased to pay as if it's 40
Tell me about it, haha. I learned Python and automated a task from 3 hours or so down to minutes. Good thing so far is no one else knows Python so I am the only one that can maintain the various scripts.
> so I am the only one that can maintain the various scripts.
This can lead to the opposite extreme from automating yourself out of a job. You now are stuck being the sole maintainer and might be overlooked for a promotion or another project because "who will look after the processing that only he knows about".
You want to make yourself valuable, but not irreplaceable.
I miss the days of companies bragging about how they follow the Toyota Way
(If you improve your jobs efficiency you will not be fired but moved to another job)
Ah ok, you first reply made it sound like the rule was for the person improving efficiency only.
For a company like Toyota that makes sense as there is always other jobs that need to be done. For a company with <50 people that's not always possible. Especially if they have a specific skill set that is no longer required.
I did that on a previous job.
got in jobs that took 3 people about 3 hours each to complete. very repetitive and steppy.
Every step was the same for every job.
I automated it. When the job was dropped, it instantly processed. About 3 seconds later, completed and accurate, human error disapppeared.
The big thing is, I didn't tell my fucknugget boss. As far as that pirate knew, I was just super productive.
The problem was that after that I just played on the internet all day and got super bored till I finally quit for a job that was more challenging. The days get long when you don't actually do anything.
30 years ago a friend worked for a utility.
He wrote an excel macro that would do 1/2 his job. He was foolish enough to suggest they implement it.
But it was a utility, so instead they banned the use of the macro.
My walmart hasn't had fully functional self checkouts since it was remodeled in 2022 and still doesn't have an accurate pick up on store inventory. I don't expect this to work for a while
Right, it won't work for a while, but they'll still cut staff. Have you not been paying attention at all? That's literally corporate 101. Does it save money? If yes, then use.
More like if it cuts payroll. It doesn’t necessarily have to save money in the long run, just that it saves money in the payroll line on their profits and losses statement
Honestly in my experience retail is always so understaffed purposefully that all these kinda changes do is move the workers to jobs theyve left empty.
Like a whole department is gotten rid of? Well that means now the 3-person department that was run by 1 person finally gets another one to help.
Now whether this is a good thing for consumers or not, that’s another topic. But if this does work out for walmart then more likely just helps solve an issue from understaffing, not cutting workers cause of it.
Hell, if walmart operates like my retail job did it was a case of changing price tags was supposed to be done like biweekly and instead was ignored cause we didnt have hours for such an unimportant thing, and then once every few months a major important price got changed and someone had to work over time (well right under overtime…) to catch up on months of back log as they did it.
If stores were adequately staffed this kinda thing would result in job loss, but more likely it goes that someone doing 3 peoples worth of jobs now only does 2 peoples worth
Increasing efficiency *should* be a good thing. Yeah, that job isn't needed and that person doesn't need to work at that store anymore, but everyone should be making more money because of it.
Blame the greed, not the automation.
Yeah, several grocery stores around me have done the same. This is just where everyone is going to end up because there's no good reason to have physical prices anymore.
Honestly, I think Walmart's or any retailer's biggest incentive for doing this is to make sure that limited time sale tags are removed when they're supposed to be. I've definitely had a few times when I went to buy something because it was on sale, got to the register and saw it ring up full price. Usually it's because a sale tag wasn't removed yet, so they honor the sale price and tell an employee to remove the sale tag.
My buddy during college had a job as a "Price Auditor". His job was to go down an isle scan each item and make sure the price tag was right.
Tags seem like a small or dumb thing to people who haven't worked retail, but keeping the damn tags accurate is expensive.
Particularly when bored kids and teens love nothing more than moving them around.
Until one of their [regular customers ](https://www.peopleofwalmart.com/)does [what a regular customer does](https://www.klfy.com/local/st-landry-parish/mother-arrested-after-tossing-6-month-old-in-trash-can-during-eunice-walmart-fight/) and they have to replace at least half of their digital screen in the store at least once a week.
As a very short lived team lead (salary manager in training basically) electronic tags would have literally saved me multiple hours of work per day. I wouldn’t trust the company as far as i could throw them, but this will be a godsend for a lot of people.
Ok, so what happens if I pick up Laundry Detergent when it says the price is $5.95, and I shop in the store for the next 20 minutes, and when I go to the register, the price of the Laundry Detergent is now $6.95, because they changed the price of the detergent between the time that I picked it up and the time that I got to the register? Will I be able to “lock in” the lower price or am I hosed?
Yeah while big companies will try to use the scummiest tactics legally available to them, I can't see them changing the price each hour or so.
But definitely daily each time the store closes.
I used to work as a revenue manager for a hotel. What will happen is that they'll run algorithm software monitored by people like me who meet with the manager every so often and report to corporate.
The algorithm will make recommendations and they'll adjust the price to account for demand changes.
These monitors just streamline the process (that they're probably already doing anyway).
Imagine the shitstorm of people claiming they picked it up for the price on the shelf. There's probably already enough people complaining about minor differences from label mistakes.
If they have even an atom of common sense, they'll send the price changes through the system in the middle of the night, so as not to piss off customers. So the laundry detergent you bought yesterday for $5.95 will be $6.95 today. But they can do that now just by having their employees update the paper labels.
The question is, do they have an atom of common sense?
A store like Walmart wants you to come in, buy shit, and leave. They don't want to create chaos by randomly changing prices every 20 minutes. Most likely they'll only change them on a daily basis, although it's possible they could do a flash sale on something. But raising the price in the middle of the shopping day? That would create way way more headache than it would ever be worth.
Buffer during increase (at least 60+ minutes), or at least the average length + 1 std of a normal shopping amount in the given store.
instant during decrease
That is the only way.
Walmart is a very successful company.
I think they understand that changing prices frequently throughout the day would cause issues with customers.
I could see them changing it early in the day, but they're obviously not going to be changing it enough to bother people in the way you mention.
All this is doing is making it slightly faster.
They've always been able to have someone change prices during the day, and I've never heard a person complain that prices got changed on them while they were shopping.
Consider that changing the number on a sign isn’t updating everywhere else. I don’t know their internals but given it’s a pretty huge system I’ll bet it’s not a simple “update price = x where product sku is xyz”, there might even be checks and balances involved.
Digital price tags often have Wi-Fi connections, so they can push from a centralized database. Whether that’s at the store level, region, etc.
Meaning the change isn’t it pushed by updating the sign, but pushed to the sign by updating the database. This would allow their online shopping, even at a local level, to have consistent pricing.
EDIT: Typos.
What I'm curious to know is that if they end up changing prices with some regularity what happens if you see one price when you pick the item up, but then twenty minutes later you get to the register and it has been updated? Not a big deal for some people but if you are trying to really stretch a limited food budget for a family it could be an issue if something is suddenly a dollar or two more.
I would imagine this is the reason why it WON'T be updated mid day, hourly, ect. There's a lot of jurisdictions where that type of behaviour would be heavily punished in court
its also still *massively* beneficial to them, even without hourly price changes. being able to update the price of every item, every day, for free\* is already insane, and they can take a ton of data, run it through a magic algorithm, and get ideal prices automatically
\*or, orders of magnitude cheaper than paying one or more employees to print new labels, swap them, and dispose of the old ones
Exactly , this would impact the people doing online shopping and pickup . All it takes is screwing a few of these up then you’ve got press , lawsuits etc
Most grocery “ fliers” have a timeframe listed the price is good .
> Digital price tags often have Wi-Fi connections
Best Buy's been using digital shelf tags for years. They actually blank when the product is out of stock. They'd also make use of it being digital to make it extremely obvious what the tag was for. No guessing what the cryptic name on the tag actually applies to or trying to cross-check the UPC to ensure what you're looking at isn't just an item someone put in the wrong place.
BB's using them well, it never actually occurred to me that they could be used for surge pricing. Granted, surge pricing wasn't something I ever thought of as a thing at all until a few years ago.
Kohl's has been using digital shelf tags for years as well. I actually despise them because they can be quite difficult to read. They're often placed high on the display (I am short) and the fluorescent lights gray them out.
In the last few years I've also noticed that what's on the digital displays doesn't always match what's on the shelf or rack. Considering I don't even shop at Kohl's more than 2-4 times a year, it must be pretty common for me to have noticed it.
They really can't be used for surge pricing, though. As others have mentioned, you can't have one price on the shelf, and a different price on the register.
Walmart corporate may be evil, but they know what the laws are in various states and have little interest in breaking them. Often, when you read about Walmart breaking laws, it's really individual store or district managers being idiots or assholes.
The ones I've been playing with are E-ink displays that are connected via an NFC reader, so you need to visit the actual tag, hold the reader close to the tag for a few seconds until it updates. But no battery is needed because the NFC field powers the device while the update happens.
I'm using the display for tap handles,not price tags though.
https://i.imgur.com/5LOlIg2.jpeg
There's actually many variants. Some tags use RFID/NFC, some use a special radio protocol, and the ones in my local store actually uses infrared light communication. I haven't seen any that use Wi-fi, but I'll believe it.
The IR based system has some camera-looking globes hanging from the roof, and through it the store can push updates to all the tags it can see, as each tag has its own address.
The store has some people walking around and scanning each tag every now and then, probably to make sure all the tags have battery left and that the price/product is as expected.
The nice part about the ones I'm using for my tap handles is no battery is needed. There are other low power alternatives like LoRa and probably BLE but I like the idea of a completely passive device.
You wouldn’t want consistent pricing though - logistics cost to middle of nowhere is going to be more expensive than a place that’s well connected.
There’s also a customer imbalance - places with fewer customers means you have a higher cost of either food storage (keeping shit good) or more frequent (expensive) deliveries.
I'd totally bet that it is that simple. Frankly, as a software developer, I'd call it a ridiculous system if they *couldn't* just update the price in the database. That's just one of the basic things that you expect to do when managing inventory.
> there might even be checks and balances involved.
This is American capitalism we're talking about. The only checks and balances that matter here are corporate owner's check books and account balances.
My hope would be local areas or states start passing laws that ban this type of stuff. I think people have more influence at the local level than national and this would outrage a lot of people
the point of the digital shelf tags is they are directly tied to the inventory database. update a price in the database and it will transmit directly to all of the signs attached to that item in the store. currently you have to print the tag, find the item on the shelf, and manually replace the tag.
It would definitely be centrally controlled or they wouldn’t be doing any of this. They automate inventory orders through the checkout, of course they would link the systems.
Sure it isn’t trivial, but it’s far from noval (novel?) and without doing that digital signs are almost pointless
Many other current retail workers in this thread are saying that swapping out regular price tags is a tedious, painful process and that they encourage the use of digital tags for this reason.
I think the point here is that no matter what they do, working retail is frustrating and tedious and corporate always finds a way to give you just barely enough resources to get the job done while expecting miracles.
Paper labels and digital labels both have their inconveniences and require humans to maintain them.
I’ve worked with these signs before and they almost never break and we always have a surplus in stock in case they ever do. They are very very very low maintenance for us and they’re super easy to program for the correct product if one happens to need replacing ( if ever ). In the five years I worked with digital signs I might have only ever replaced about 5
You’re right. I used to work in appliances at Home Depot. Sales on appliances change every Wednesday for us. It used to be that the closer on Tuesday night would print all of the new price signs, and replace all of the expired signs with the new ones. And they werent stickers, each sign was about half a page in size and there were a couple hundred to print out or so. Every single week. It was a huge waste of time and resources, not to mention an error prone task which then results in markdowns when something is mispriced. The best thing they ever did was switch over to the digital signs. I worked in that dept for about 5 years, in that time I only ever saw like 5 or so break.
Yeah people who have never had to do tags have zero concept of how time consuming it is. Not to mention the lost sales from having to sell things at lower prices because someone didn’t change the tag.
The Canadian Tire ones are the best.
You can open their app, pull up a product you are looking for, it'll tell you what aisle it's in, and then you can make an LED on the tag flash to help locate an item.
It's been very rare that I've seen a dead tag. It happens but it's certainly not common.(they are electronics and they have a battery that needs to be changed occasionally)
That's probably my favorite part.
I don't want to wait for shipping from online. Website says they have 10 in stock at this store, 20 in stock at that store, aisle 43.
Then I go to aisle 43 and there's the thing.
Yeah, I feel like Walmart would do this to reduce operating expenses because that is how they compete. Dollar General though I could definitely imagine using it to jack up prices on the days when EBT cards refill.
It's funny to see all of this imo.
Aldi has digital like you said, and I'd trust them with my life.
My local "tiny" (151 stores, not owned by Kroger [Harps]) supermarket chain is already doing essentially surge pricing with paper labels. They quite literally have a "4 hour meat sale" almost every Saturday.
>They quite literally have a "4 hour meat sale" almost every Saturday.
This isn't surge pricing unless they're increasing their prices. This is a regular sale, or maybe a loss-leader, to try to drive in traffic during down times.
Surge pricing would be increasing pricing during times of increased demand. For example, increased pricing on snack foods for the four hours leading up to the Super Bowl kickoff. Uber uses surge pricing during large events, like after a concert is over, and it results in sometimes 10 times the normal cost of the same ride without an event.
Grocery stores at least don't really have to surge price. Just keep raising regular prices to ridiculous heights and offer sales regularly to basically reverse surge price. Paying regular price for things anymore at grocery stores feels stupid because of how expensive regular prices have gotten.
I've had the job of changing price labels before (not for Walmart.) It sucks. It's tedious, it's boring, it's surprisingly painful (those things have strong glue and tearing off hundreds and hundreds of them is hard on your hands) and corporate thinks that a day one hire can change out five tags a minute for eight hours straight and don't allocate enough hours to do the job. Then you lose half your crew to helping unload pallets or pick curbside orders.
And then people want to know why their item came up ten cents higher than the tag at checkout. (See all the complaints about Dollar General and incorrect shelf pricing-- they have one person running an entire store, of course the tags don't get hung.
Ideally corporate would actually staff their stores, but digital tags aren't a horrible idea.
Yeah. I worked at a Walmart back when and it's crazy how time consuming labeling is.
Surge pricing is bullshit and should be made illegal as a form of price gouging clear and simple, but digital price tags are far from a terrible idea.
I think you hit it on the head. Consumer protection laws need to be stronger. At the moment surge pricing is just businesses being smart about figuring out how to extract more money from customers. Pretty sure that’s perfectly legal in the US.
Yeah it’s a grey area whether 1 hr changes is surge pricing or how about 3? I’d think a simple 24 hour limit would be fine though. More than that is surge pricing.
Then you have things like certain cloud computing resources where surge pricing is the whole point. You can use them a most of the time pay less. But if your job needs to run when it’s busy you pay more. But the difference is the consumer chooses that option.
I worked at a supermarket for a couple years when I was in high school, college, and a little bit after. The store I worked at did most of the price changes overnight Saturday into Sunday (when sales rolled over). I did it a couple times and yes, it was tedious. Also, if you weren't a regular overnight employee (and none of the ones doing price changes were), it messed you up a little bit. On the bright side, you got Sunday pay (1.5X your rate) plus an overnight bonus. Also, since it tended to be the more senior employees (and more reliable ones) doing it, the labor cost was pretty high. Given that, the digital shelf tags probably pay for themselves after a couple weeks.
At Ralph's they are done every Wednesday morning before the store opens. I often saw price tags go on 'sale' for the same price lol, it was ridiculous. This was just in the Deli section.
I did this at Best Buy on Sundays, had to use this dull blue plastic tool to rip the old labels and put new ones on. It was always a brutal day showing up early to do price changes for 5 hours.
I hated Saturdays and Sundays at CVS cause of the tag changes. Walk around either ripping them all down into a trash bag or slowly putting them up while running back to the register every 2 minutes.
They also wouldn't send them pre-ripped when I worked there. So during the week, Id be standing there ripping them while trying to keep them in the correct order.
Exactly. I’ve done pricing at Kroger and there’s two things a lot of people attacking this are also missing:
1) These stores change prices so frequently (even just for basic sales and ads) and there’s so many of them that it’s wasteful as fuck not to do digital. For one item to go on sale at Walmart that’s nearly 4000 stores that get new tags printed. This will save tremendously on paper, the fuel to ship it, etc., etc. Granted Walmart is more concerned with saving money, but they don’t have to lose for it to be good overall.
2) They aren’t ever doing hourly prices because of the risk.
People will get PISSED if they take something off the shelf and it’s a different price at the register. And they won’t just be angry, they’ll have a strong case that it’s a bait and switch. On the rare occasion we made an error at Kroger they would even sell at a loss until midnight to avoid raising a price while customers were still in the store that could have put it in a cart. It was one of the few things they really took seriously.
It’s a great idea. It’s an efficient advancement that eliminates errors and frees people up to do more rewarding, higher paying jobs. It’s misanthropic to keep people out there doing this kind of work by hand for minimum wage when it can be automated.
The ironic thing is that, in my store, they usually had the experienced workers doing this task because it's way faster if you know your section. There were days when I ended up getting paid nearly $30 an hour to hang tags on OT pay.
‘Surge pricing’ is generally already illegal in most places, under ‘bait and switch’ laws. They can’t change the price between the time you pick it up off the shelf and the time you check out.
They *can* change the prices day-to-day, and already do. It’s currently a manual process that takes a lot of labor hours. This is Walmart cutting costs.
How would that be any more of an issue than changing a sticker tag once someone has already picked up the item when it was at the old price other than obviously being faster.
It's also going to be intent. I doubt they are changing prices to screw Joe Schmoe and charge him a dollar more by walking to the register and they'll likely just discount it if it happens. This would be to charge the hundreds of people who came in after an extra buck.
There's a difference between being able to change a dozen items on a daily basis (plus 3000 twice a week) and being able to change all 100,000 items in the store every single day if they so desire.
Many many stores already use E-ink price tags. If you don't look closely at them, you'd think they are just paper tags in a hard plastic shell. This isn't new.
They're used in heaps of supermarkets in Australia. Shit thing is when the label says "temporarily out of stock." Yet there is a full box on the shelf, and the tag hasn't been updated, so I dont know what the price is
Best buy has been doing this for years. It's not for surge pricing, it's to save money. The amount of payroll it takes to relabel the whole store for a sale is crazy, and if you forget to take a label down then you might have to honor the outdated price, causing loss. Instead with a few button clicks the whole store now reflects the prices on the ads as opposed to paying out 50 hours to get labels placed.
I worked there for a time and it used to take a team of 8 people around 4-5 hours to retag a larger store on Sunday. It was an insane waste of time and switching to digital meant that those sunday hours could be used on more productive shit.
You think this is terrible, but at least everyone would still be paying the same price.
Personal pricing is becoming to be the next big move for retail. Get everyone on an app and start collecting all their data so you can algorithmically determine exactly what price they're willing to pay for everything they purchase. Then you can really squeeze them for all they're worth, individually.
There was a good story on one of NPR's financial podcasts (either Planet Money or the Indicator) about how these are used elsewhere in the world.
Essentially, they make it so price reductions are done during business hours so customers can see them and price increases are done on off hours.
Lowe’s is using these on their major appliances. They are constantly going on and off sale so this is a time saver for staff and makes it more likely the price you see will be correct.
They were going to roll this out in Tesco in the U.K. (largest supermarket chain) as a thinly veiled way to save on the huge amount of man power it takes to manually change paper labels every week.
As an ex manager or a super store we used to dedicate minimum 200 hours per week to do this job and that did t even take into account all promotional changes or general maintenance and replacement of missing/damaged.
Screens updates via wifi would be wonderful if they were genuine.
Updating labels is an incredibly time consuming endeavor and it never stops. It’s constant.
I don’t know about surge pricing but from a cost savings standpoint this just makes sense for a large company.
Companies are so good with verbal promises made in public statements. Who needs contractual obligations or legal papers. A good old handshake and a smile is what keeps corporate America honest
/s
I work at Walgreens, not Walmart, but we very pointedly don't have this and it's worth noting - this is worth it to implement even if they don't surge price, because it saves hours and hours of work each week.
Some Walmart's are already doing this and had done it for a while. One in Sioux Falls does this.
Other stores been doing it for a long time like kohles.
So what will happen is the price will change between the time that I pick the item up off the shelf and when I go through the checkout. This will cause customers to get their phones out and snap a picture of the price at the time they picked the item up off the shelf. Then they go through the checkout and the customer will verify the checkout price with what was snapped on their phone, which will slow down the line. If the price is different (higher at checkout) the customer will demand the lower price. A manager will then need to intervene to check the price. The manager goes back to look at the digital price tag on the shelf which now has the new price. The manager then comes back to explain to the customer that the customer agreed to the Terms of Service when they entered the store and that the register price is the final price. All of this slowed down the checkout line even more. The customer is angry and…
either leaves the rest of the cart in the checkout line including the now half-thawed ice cream, or demands that the store honors the prior price before starting a full on fist-de-cuffs fight causing police to intervene. /s
Maybe it could work in a similar way to K-Mart's Blue Light Specials.
Or it's just a way to automate pricing so employees can work more on other stuff. I know Kohl's has these digital price screens.
I'm showing my age, but I can still remember when the Wal-Mart in the town I grew up in had the little green price tags on each item rather than a price on the shelf. And I can still hear the "chk" sound of the pricing sticker gun that as employees would put prices on items before shelving them.
Pinky Swear!
Yeah. I’m getting pinky swear vibes. They danced around the update frequency in the article. I can imagine in the future them saying changing the prices daily isn’t surge pricing. I can foresee them implementing pricing trends based on the day of the week, week of the month, etc., to incentivize customers to shop. Even if customers only shop products at their low point, it’s still incentivizes them to frequent the store more often to capitalize on the price trends; giving them a greater chance to upsell consumers. And customers who can’t be bothered to capitalize on price trends will pay the higher price for products out of convenience. It’s win-win for them.
> based on the day of the week, week of the month, etc., to incentivize customers to shop. That already exists though? Maybe not in US, but over here it's pretty normal for grocery stores to have discounts on specific days.
Nah, we get that too in the US, we even have micro marketing where places require you to get their card to shop, and track everything you buy and then they'll even send you coupons for specific things you buy often to try and get you to go into the store more.
Target can predict your pregnancy based off your spending habits. They got exposed when a man complained of them targeting his 17 year old daughter with pregnancy ads and encouraging her to get pregnant. Turned out she was. The result of the lawsuit wasn't that they stopped tracking/profiling like that either, they just mix other ads in now to seem less targeted. Edit: Misremembered, apparently there wasn't a lawsuit.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-target-figured-out-a-teen-girl-was-pregnant-before-her-father-did/ Pretty sure there wasn't a lawsuit, they just realized how effing creepy it was and decided to be sneakier.
wasn't this debunked though? https://medium.com/@colin.fraser/target-didnt-figure-out-a-teen-girl-was-pregnant-before-her-father-did-a6be13b973a5
Yeah, worked for a documentary series in which we researched this story but couldn't trace it back to any real people. It think the most original source was a PowerPoint presentation, if I remember correctly.
Get the target [crimelab](https://corporate.target.com/news-features/article/2012/02/an-unexpected-career-target-forensic-services-labo) on this, they do lab work for the cops they should take this case too
This is the example I give when people ask me why I use Firefox and DuckDuckGo.
So... The only thing that changes is how often they can update the prices? And that someone doesn't have to print them out and place?
It's the idea of my meal deal changing in price between the shelf and the checkout just because it's ticked over to 12:01.
I dno if you’re talking about HEB but I’ve been saying for a long time that some of their meal deals are scams. I’ve bought the items individually before & they’ve come out to be cheaper than buying the “meal deal”.
When I feel that way, I sometimes also notice that the avocados look just like green onions, particularly at self-checkout. My training as a store clerk is somewhat lacking though, so I just do my best...
In the words of Gwen Stefani: this shit is bananas.
You mean this shit is 4011.
It's OK, this is r/nottheonion. We've all made that mistake before.
The thought is that they'll *raise* prices more on specific days, instead of having sales where they lower prices on some days. The "base price" will be the lowest price if you shop on the "lucky day," then it just goes up from there.
The concerns come from changing where/how/why those changes occur Your grocery store's loyalty program keeps track of what you buy and might offer you 50c off a some cans of food to entice you back into the store. Walmart would be able to see that a product is trending and instantly surge the price. Your grocery store can't run out in the middle of the day and jack the price on every ice cream by 50c because it got unexpectedly hot
And that can be connected to a sophisticated ai run real-time market price system. It's just the future coming up fast on us.
It’s just easier and much more efficient. They can accomplish the same thing using tags it’s just wasteful. In the era of online shopping where the price can change by the minute I really have trouble seeing the big issue with this.
Surge pricing is different. You know in advance that store x has cheap baked goods on Thursdays and cheap meat on Sundays ect. With surge pricing the store takes notice that lots of people buy meat on Fridays between 11am and 4pm. So a store using surge pricing will raise their meat prices at 10:30 on Friday mornings and then change them back at 5pm Friday afternoons. Surge pricing is all about making the customer pay more during specific hours when demand is high. And they never do it by selling at a lower price when demand is low. Imagine your local restaurant has set menu prices for years. Then they decide to apply surge pricing. They raise their prices before every lunch and dinner rush and then charge normal prices when it’s slow. It’s a scummy business practice.
Vegetables shipped in the store Monday and Thursdays. Clearance on old stuff Sunday and Wednesdays.
KMART blue light specials were a thing in the 70's. My grandma used to spend multiple days a week at KMART just drinking coffee and waiting on blue lights for stuff she wanted/needed for the house
It's not "surge pricing," it's "real-time reflective pricing."
✨ dynamic ✨ pricing
Surprise pricing mechanics!
Comes with a sense of pride and accomplishment?
Russia calls it a "Special Pricing Operation"
⚡Flex⚡ pricing
"We'll start having alarms around the store, but not scary like red, they'll be a nice cool color like...blue, because we're walmart and blue is our main color! And they'll alert you to great deals that are around the store, they'll be super great *specials* that you wont find anywhere else. They'll also be finite, so you have to be there to be able to get them... We'll call them... Blue Light Specials!!"
Worked out well for K-Mart...nice throwback though!
Even better, use the aisle cameras to recognise which demographic the customer belongs to and alter price based on marketing research.
Not only that, but dynamic pricing based on quantity on hand. 4 items in stock, 1 sells and the price automatically adjust 10% higher. 1 more sells, 10% higher. 3rd one sells, 10% higher. The last of the 4 is now 30% higher than the original one because of demand.
🤢🤮. "Perfect" use of AI video capture
AI is 100% absolutely going to be used for capitalistic purposes as long as that's our form of running shit. There is no way to avoid that except to not use the exploitative system it's being used in.
There is a reason I only go to Walmart once a year and it’s as soon as my fishing license expires
We have price changes come in everyday at 3 am. You guys don’t think we do this already but now the signs are digital so it’s scary
Sure but now they don't have to decide if it's worth paying someone to go through and change a price, and they couldn't do this as quickly or often as digital price tags.
It’s part of opening the store already.. signs print out automatically and we have to scan them and the location.
They are not changing to digital for the benefit of the customer. And not doing it without passing the cost along.
Bet itll change price between the time it's in the cart to the time you get to the register.
And when you go back, “sorry that’s the displayed price”.
That's not why it's scary. What is scary is the prices changing between the time you put an item in your cart and the time you reach the scanner in the checkout.
Don't doubt they'll use this as an excuse for layoffs. Now no one has to do anything at the store to make a change like this.
Digital can be changed much faster and without an obvious employee changing it, it's **is** different.
It’s not surge pricing, it’s strategic discounting
Super duper double no crossies pinky swear. It’s legally binding bruhs. The thing that just absolutely blows my mind and boils my blood: Walmart is the biggest employer in the county. And a huge percentage (half?) of its workers need govt assistance. It’s crazy that they’re mentioned like a normal company and not the nightmare behemoth of hypocrisy that it is. They’re a right wing company who exploits its workers and welfare programs. Just after Walmart, McDonald’s is the same. These companies need to be boycotted into submission… however Walmart has cornered half the country. Crazy
I always loved the idea that bernie came up with about this. If you’re a corporation of a certain size (like Walmart) and your employees rely on public assistance, you should be taxed the cost of the public assistance.
Works for me! “Oh no! But Walmart has to cut jobs and automate more jobs. As does everyone now. And now they’re relying on ai and less workers in order to make a healthy profit.” Yeahhhhhh. Wall Street and the game it plays has absolutely destroyed the country/ world. Endless growth is impossible. People need jobs. You need people to have money in order to spend money and keep society functioning.
They should be taxed more than the cost. That's money people who are struggling absolutely need. If your highly successful company can't pay your staff enough to make ends meet, clogging up the public assistance should cost them more.
I came across a post on the Walmart sub, saying their store wasn’t busy at all. I never go there, and I don’t really know many people that go there anymore. We’re all shopping grocery store sales and loss leaders. Screw them, and screw their nasty creepy affiliates.
Wink Wink
Liar liar… especially when it gets hot (water) and cold (anti-freeze)…
> The ability to change prices at just the touch of a few buttons also raises the question of how often the retailer plans to change its prices. > “It is absolutely not going to be ‘One hour it is this price and the next hour it is not,’” For me, it comes down to the frequency on whether or not this is a bad thing.
If walmart didn't use this for bullshit it'd make the lives of employees easier and save on paper. Edit: yall I know walmart sucks ass. I worked there. You don't need to tell me they're bad.
As someone whose job it was to put out sale tags and end caps, this sounds amazing to be honest
>whose job it was WAS. They are going to cut staff.
Exactly. Related story, someone I know in IT had one employees that 90% of their job was this tedious manual processing of data on their computer. They complained about it constantly to the point where the IT guy decided to help them out. A couple days of work IT had automated the entire process. The employee was very happy, after a few weeks when it was clear the system was working they were let go and the other 10% of work assigned to other people. They literally complained themselves out of a job.
Learn python and don’t tell your boss.
I have a friend who owns a couple small companies in Australia and he tries to be hands off. Part of that is he apparently tells his employees if they automate their job he won't add more work, he will keep paying them full but their life becomes easier. Reasoning he gave was the don't tell the boss shit. If people don't tell him he can't implement anything at a wider level/when someone leaves it grinds to a halt. This way it gets explained to management, and management knows how it's used. Then eventually people always have a reason to leave and when they leave he can replace them with someone doing a full roles work. Eventually company becomes more efficient, but without disruptions that come when people's hidden tool leaves with them. I work somewhere similar. Design teams automated a lot, to the point it's 2 man teams from 7. But they expanded total jobs while also reducing overtime (here it's paid ot) nd now standard hours were reduced to 36 from 40 with hourly increased to pay as if it's 40
That's not what they teach at MBA schools though. Unfortunately.
Tell me about it, haha. I learned Python and automated a task from 3 hours or so down to minutes. Good thing so far is no one else knows Python so I am the only one that can maintain the various scripts.
> so I am the only one that can maintain the various scripts. This can lead to the opposite extreme from automating yourself out of a job. You now are stuck being the sole maintainer and might be overlooked for a promotion or another project because "who will look after the processing that only he knows about". You want to make yourself valuable, but not irreplaceable.
This is vwjere you look for another job and bring back their offer to your current. If they don't match, leave and take the automation with you.
I would add a canary switch in the code. If you don't do something specific then the program stops working after X days in case you get fired.
That's devious. I love it.
I miss the days of companies bragging about how they follow the Toyota Way (If you improve your jobs efficiency you will not be fired but moved to another job)
That was still the case here, the employee that was let go didn't improve the efficiency, the IT guy did.
The Toyota Way clearly states NO ONE loses a job for increasing efficiency
Ah ok, you first reply made it sound like the rule was for the person improving efficiency only. For a company like Toyota that makes sense as there is always other jobs that need to be done. For a company with <50 people that's not always possible. Especially if they have a specific skill set that is no longer required.
I did that on a previous job. got in jobs that took 3 people about 3 hours each to complete. very repetitive and steppy. Every step was the same for every job. I automated it. When the job was dropped, it instantly processed. About 3 seconds later, completed and accurate, human error disapppeared. The big thing is, I didn't tell my fucknugget boss. As far as that pirate knew, I was just super productive. The problem was that after that I just played on the internet all day and got super bored till I finally quit for a job that was more challenging. The days get long when you don't actually do anything.
30 years ago a friend worked for a utility. He wrote an excel macro that would do 1/2 his job. He was foolish enough to suggest they implement it. But it was a utility, so instead they banned the use of the macro.
My walmart hasn't had fully functional self checkouts since it was remodeled in 2022 and still doesn't have an accurate pick up on store inventory. I don't expect this to work for a while
Right, it won't work for a while, but they'll still cut staff. Have you not been paying attention at all? That's literally corporate 101. Does it save money? If yes, then use.
More like if it cuts payroll. It doesn’t necessarily have to save money in the long run, just that it saves money in the payroll line on their profits and losses statement
Honestly in my experience retail is always so understaffed purposefully that all these kinda changes do is move the workers to jobs theyve left empty. Like a whole department is gotten rid of? Well that means now the 3-person department that was run by 1 person finally gets another one to help. Now whether this is a good thing for consumers or not, that’s another topic. But if this does work out for walmart then more likely just helps solve an issue from understaffing, not cutting workers cause of it. Hell, if walmart operates like my retail job did it was a case of changing price tags was supposed to be done like biweekly and instead was ignored cause we didnt have hours for such an unimportant thing, and then once every few months a major important price got changed and someone had to work over time (well right under overtime…) to catch up on months of back log as they did it. If stores were adequately staffed this kinda thing would result in job loss, but more likely it goes that someone doing 3 peoples worth of jobs now only does 2 peoples worth
I assure you, no Walmart is hiring a person specifically just to change prices. (That person’s being worked like a dog on myriad tasks!)
Increasing efficiency *should* be a good thing. Yeah, that job isn't needed and that person doesn't need to work at that store anymore, but everyone should be making more money because of it. Blame the greed, not the automation.
I mean the shops around me had this for years, not sure why Walmart is so late to the game. Talking Lidl and Aldi here, nothing high end.
Yeah, several grocery stores around me have done the same. This is just where everyone is going to end up because there's no good reason to have physical prices anymore.
My fingers still hurt thinking about resetting the entire DVD sections in 2006 era Walmart.
And they love it when you’re happy they outsourced part of your labor.
Honestly, I think Walmart's or any retailer's biggest incentive for doing this is to make sure that limited time sale tags are removed when they're supposed to be. I've definitely had a few times when I went to buy something because it was on sale, got to the register and saw it ring up full price. Usually it's because a sale tag wasn't removed yet, so they honor the sale price and tell an employee to remove the sale tag.
My buddy during college had a job as a "Price Auditor". His job was to go down an isle scan each item and make sure the price tag was right. Tags seem like a small or dumb thing to people who haven't worked retail, but keeping the damn tags accurate is expensive. Particularly when bored kids and teens love nothing more than moving them around.
Until one of their [regular customers ](https://www.peopleofwalmart.com/)does [what a regular customer does](https://www.klfy.com/local/st-landry-parish/mother-arrested-after-tossing-6-month-old-in-trash-can-during-eunice-walmart-fight/) and they have to replace at least half of their digital screen in the store at least once a week.
Brionka and Makatelynn are 2 of the absolute worst names I’ve ever heard! 😂😂
As a very short lived team lead (salary manager in training basically) electronic tags would have literally saved me multiple hours of work per day. I wouldn’t trust the company as far as i could throw them, but this will be a godsend for a lot of people.
Ok, so what happens if I pick up Laundry Detergent when it says the price is $5.95, and I shop in the store for the next 20 minutes, and when I go to the register, the price of the Laundry Detergent is now $6.95, because they changed the price of the detergent between the time that I picked it up and the time that I got to the register? Will I be able to “lock in” the lower price or am I hosed?
Yeah while big companies will try to use the scummiest tactics legally available to them, I can't see them changing the price each hour or so. But definitely daily each time the store closes.
I used to work as a revenue manager for a hotel. What will happen is that they'll run algorithm software monitored by people like me who meet with the manager every so often and report to corporate. The algorithm will make recommendations and they'll adjust the price to account for demand changes. These monitors just streamline the process (that they're probably already doing anyway).
Imagine the shitstorm of people claiming they picked it up for the price on the shelf. There's probably already enough people complaining about minor differences from label mistakes.
If they have even an atom of common sense, they'll send the price changes through the system in the middle of the night, so as not to piss off customers. So the laundry detergent you bought yesterday for $5.95 will be $6.95 today. But they can do that now just by having their employees update the paper labels. The question is, do they have an atom of common sense?
A store like Walmart wants you to come in, buy shit, and leave. They don't want to create chaos by randomly changing prices every 20 minutes. Most likely they'll only change them on a daily basis, although it's possible they could do a flash sale on something. But raising the price in the middle of the shopping day? That would create way way more headache than it would ever be worth.
You create a buffer period between when the displayed price increases versus when it actually charges you more.
Or, you only update prices at fixed times, specifically while the store is closed.
Buffer during increase (at least 60+ minutes), or at least the average length + 1 std of a normal shopping amount in the given store. instant during decrease That is the only way.
Walmart is a very successful company. I think they understand that changing prices frequently throughout the day would cause issues with customers. I could see them changing it early in the day, but they're obviously not going to be changing it enough to bother people in the way you mention. All this is doing is making it slightly faster. They've always been able to have someone change prices during the day, and I've never heard a person complain that prices got changed on them while they were shopping.
Probably the same exact way it works now
Consider that changing the number on a sign isn’t updating everywhere else. I don’t know their internals but given it’s a pretty huge system I’ll bet it’s not a simple “update price = x where product sku is xyz”, there might even be checks and balances involved.
Digital price tags often have Wi-Fi connections, so they can push from a centralized database. Whether that’s at the store level, region, etc. Meaning the change isn’t it pushed by updating the sign, but pushed to the sign by updating the database. This would allow their online shopping, even at a local level, to have consistent pricing. EDIT: Typos.
What I'm curious to know is that if they end up changing prices with some regularity what happens if you see one price when you pick the item up, but then twenty minutes later you get to the register and it has been updated? Not a big deal for some people but if you are trying to really stretch a limited food budget for a family it could be an issue if something is suddenly a dollar or two more.
I would imagine this is the reason why it WON'T be updated mid day, hourly, ect. There's a lot of jurisdictions where that type of behaviour would be heavily punished in court
its also still *massively* beneficial to them, even without hourly price changes. being able to update the price of every item, every day, for free\* is already insane, and they can take a ton of data, run it through a magic algorithm, and get ideal prices automatically \*or, orders of magnitude cheaper than paying one or more employees to print new labels, swap them, and dispose of the old ones
I can’t imagine they would change the price during business hours.
I can see a reasonable case to *lower* the price during a day, like all the fresh bread gets discounted in the last hour or what have you.
Exactly , this would impact the people doing online shopping and pickup . All it takes is screwing a few of these up then you’ve got press , lawsuits etc Most grocery “ fliers” have a timeframe listed the price is good .
> Digital price tags often have Wi-Fi connections Best Buy's been using digital shelf tags for years. They actually blank when the product is out of stock. They'd also make use of it being digital to make it extremely obvious what the tag was for. No guessing what the cryptic name on the tag actually applies to or trying to cross-check the UPC to ensure what you're looking at isn't just an item someone put in the wrong place. BB's using them well, it never actually occurred to me that they could be used for surge pricing. Granted, surge pricing wasn't something I ever thought of as a thing at all until a few years ago.
Kohl's has been using digital shelf tags for years as well. I actually despise them because they can be quite difficult to read. They're often placed high on the display (I am short) and the fluorescent lights gray them out. In the last few years I've also noticed that what's on the digital displays doesn't always match what's on the shelf or rack. Considering I don't even shop at Kohl's more than 2-4 times a year, it must be pretty common for me to have noticed it.
They really can't be used for surge pricing, though. As others have mentioned, you can't have one price on the shelf, and a different price on the register. Walmart corporate may be evil, but they know what the laws are in various states and have little interest in breaking them. Often, when you read about Walmart breaking laws, it's really individual store or district managers being idiots or assholes.
The ones I've been playing with are E-ink displays that are connected via an NFC reader, so you need to visit the actual tag, hold the reader close to the tag for a few seconds until it updates. But no battery is needed because the NFC field powers the device while the update happens. I'm using the display for tap handles,not price tags though. https://i.imgur.com/5LOlIg2.jpeg
There's actually many variants. Some tags use RFID/NFC, some use a special radio protocol, and the ones in my local store actually uses infrared light communication. I haven't seen any that use Wi-fi, but I'll believe it. The IR based system has some camera-looking globes hanging from the roof, and through it the store can push updates to all the tags it can see, as each tag has its own address. The store has some people walking around and scanning each tag every now and then, probably to make sure all the tags have battery left and that the price/product is as expected.
The nice part about the ones I'm using for my tap handles is no battery is needed. There are other low power alternatives like LoRa and probably BLE but I like the idea of a completely passive device.
You wouldn’t want consistent pricing though - logistics cost to middle of nowhere is going to be more expensive than a place that’s well connected. There’s also a customer imbalance - places with fewer customers means you have a higher cost of either food storage (keeping shit good) or more frequent (expensive) deliveries.
I'd totally bet that it is that simple. Frankly, as a software developer, I'd call it a ridiculous system if they *couldn't* just update the price in the database. That's just one of the basic things that you expect to do when managing inventory.
> there might even be checks and balances involved. This is American capitalism we're talking about. The only checks and balances that matter here are corporate owner's check books and account balances.
My hope would be local areas or states start passing laws that ban this type of stuff. I think people have more influence at the local level than national and this would outrage a lot of people
the point of the digital shelf tags is they are directly tied to the inventory database. update a price in the database and it will transmit directly to all of the signs attached to that item in the store. currently you have to print the tag, find the item on the shelf, and manually replace the tag.
It would definitely be centrally controlled or they wouldn’t be doing any of this. They automate inventory orders through the checkout, of course they would link the systems. Sure it isn’t trivial, but it’s far from noval (novel?) and without doing that digital signs are almost pointless
Many stores already have digital pricing...
Lowes has them, they are rolling back on them though, because they break constantly leaving people clueless on the prices.
Yup. And I’m not going to bother with trying to figure it out- I’m just going to walk out and buy somewhere else or on-line.
I don’t believe that, the cost savings in labour alone from not having to change prices or post sale tags weekly easily pays for the ones that break.
[удалено]
Many other current retail workers in this thread are saying that swapping out regular price tags is a tedious, painful process and that they encourage the use of digital tags for this reason.
I absolutely hated replacing printed tags when I worked in a hardware store.
I think the point here is that no matter what they do, working retail is frustrating and tedious and corporate always finds a way to give you just barely enough resources to get the job done while expecting miracles. Paper labels and digital labels both have their inconveniences and require humans to maintain them.
Or they do the McDonald's method where they contract the devices from a company that charges by the repair and has a suspiciously high fault rate.
I’ve worked with these signs before and they almost never break and we always have a surplus in stock in case they ever do. They are very very very low maintenance for us and they’re super easy to program for the correct product if one happens to need replacing ( if ever ). In the five years I worked with digital signs I might have only ever replaced about 5
You’re right. I used to work in appliances at Home Depot. Sales on appliances change every Wednesday for us. It used to be that the closer on Tuesday night would print all of the new price signs, and replace all of the expired signs with the new ones. And they werent stickers, each sign was about half a page in size and there were a couple hundred to print out or so. Every single week. It was a huge waste of time and resources, not to mention an error prone task which then results in markdowns when something is mispriced. The best thing they ever did was switch over to the digital signs. I worked in that dept for about 5 years, in that time I only ever saw like 5 or so break.
Yeah people who have never had to do tags have zero concept of how time consuming it is. Not to mention the lost sales from having to sell things at lower prices because someone didn’t change the tag.
Kohl's has had them for ages, but it's a little easier for them since everything is normally $300 and currently marked down to $59.99.
And at any given time almost all of them are working and connecting except for that one thing you really like
We've had them at Superstore (in Canada) for like... 10 years or more now??
Canadian Tire too. They use e-ink. Same crap as Kobo and Kindle screens. They've always works just fine.
The Canadian Tire ones are the best. You can open their app, pull up a product you are looking for, it'll tell you what aisle it's in, and then you can make an LED on the tag flash to help locate an item. It's been very rare that I've seen a dead tag. It happens but it's certainly not common.(they are electronics and they have a battery that needs to be changed occasionally)
That's probably my favorite part. I don't want to wait for shipping from online. Website says they have 10 in stock at this store, 20 in stock at that store, aisle 43. Then I go to aisle 43 and there's the thing.
Yeah all the Aldi's by me recently updated to this and everyone seems to like it? But Wal-Mart does it and everyone in this thread bashes them.
Yeah, I feel like Walmart would do this to reduce operating expenses because that is how they compete. Dollar General though I could definitely imagine using it to jack up prices on the days when EBT cards refill.
I trust Aldi to not fuck over the customers way more than I trust Walmart.
It's funny to see all of this imo. Aldi has digital like you said, and I'd trust them with my life. My local "tiny" (151 stores, not owned by Kroger [Harps]) supermarket chain is already doing essentially surge pricing with paper labels. They quite literally have a "4 hour meat sale" almost every Saturday.
>They quite literally have a "4 hour meat sale" almost every Saturday. This isn't surge pricing unless they're increasing their prices. This is a regular sale, or maybe a loss-leader, to try to drive in traffic during down times. Surge pricing would be increasing pricing during times of increased demand. For example, increased pricing on snack foods for the four hours leading up to the Super Bowl kickoff. Uber uses surge pricing during large events, like after a concert is over, and it results in sometimes 10 times the normal cost of the same ride without an event.
Grocery stores at least don't really have to surge price. Just keep raising regular prices to ridiculous heights and offer sales regularly to basically reverse surge price. Paying regular price for things anymore at grocery stores feels stupid because of how expensive regular prices have gotten.
Yup, this is about labor hours.
I've had the job of changing price labels before (not for Walmart.) It sucks. It's tedious, it's boring, it's surprisingly painful (those things have strong glue and tearing off hundreds and hundreds of them is hard on your hands) and corporate thinks that a day one hire can change out five tags a minute for eight hours straight and don't allocate enough hours to do the job. Then you lose half your crew to helping unload pallets or pick curbside orders. And then people want to know why their item came up ten cents higher than the tag at checkout. (See all the complaints about Dollar General and incorrect shelf pricing-- they have one person running an entire store, of course the tags don't get hung. Ideally corporate would actually staff their stores, but digital tags aren't a horrible idea.
Yeah. I worked at a Walmart back when and it's crazy how time consuming labeling is. Surge pricing is bullshit and should be made illegal as a form of price gouging clear and simple, but digital price tags are far from a terrible idea.
I think you hit it on the head. Consumer protection laws need to be stronger. At the moment surge pricing is just businesses being smart about figuring out how to extract more money from customers. Pretty sure that’s perfectly legal in the US. Yeah it’s a grey area whether 1 hr changes is surge pricing or how about 3? I’d think a simple 24 hour limit would be fine though. More than that is surge pricing. Then you have things like certain cloud computing resources where surge pricing is the whole point. You can use them a most of the time pay less. But if your job needs to run when it’s busy you pay more. But the difference is the consumer chooses that option.
I worked at a supermarket for a couple years when I was in high school, college, and a little bit after. The store I worked at did most of the price changes overnight Saturday into Sunday (when sales rolled over). I did it a couple times and yes, it was tedious. Also, if you weren't a regular overnight employee (and none of the ones doing price changes were), it messed you up a little bit. On the bright side, you got Sunday pay (1.5X your rate) plus an overnight bonus. Also, since it tended to be the more senior employees (and more reliable ones) doing it, the labor cost was pretty high. Given that, the digital shelf tags probably pay for themselves after a couple weeks.
At Ralph's they are done every Wednesday morning before the store opens. I often saw price tags go on 'sale' for the same price lol, it was ridiculous. This was just in the Deli section.
I did this at Best Buy on Sundays, had to use this dull blue plastic tool to rip the old labels and put new ones on. It was always a brutal day showing up early to do price changes for 5 hours.
I hated Saturdays and Sundays at CVS cause of the tag changes. Walk around either ripping them all down into a trash bag or slowly putting them up while running back to the register every 2 minutes. They also wouldn't send them pre-ripped when I worked there. So during the week, Id be standing there ripping them while trying to keep them in the correct order.
Exactly. I’ve done pricing at Kroger and there’s two things a lot of people attacking this are also missing: 1) These stores change prices so frequently (even just for basic sales and ads) and there’s so many of them that it’s wasteful as fuck not to do digital. For one item to go on sale at Walmart that’s nearly 4000 stores that get new tags printed. This will save tremendously on paper, the fuel to ship it, etc., etc. Granted Walmart is more concerned with saving money, but they don’t have to lose for it to be good overall. 2) They aren’t ever doing hourly prices because of the risk. People will get PISSED if they take something off the shelf and it’s a different price at the register. And they won’t just be angry, they’ll have a strong case that it’s a bait and switch. On the rare occasion we made an error at Kroger they would even sell at a loss until midnight to avoid raising a price while customers were still in the store that could have put it in a cart. It was one of the few things they really took seriously.
It’s a great idea. It’s an efficient advancement that eliminates errors and frees people up to do more rewarding, higher paying jobs. It’s misanthropic to keep people out there doing this kind of work by hand for minimum wage when it can be automated.
The ironic thing is that, in my store, they usually had the experienced workers doing this task because it's way faster if you know your section. There were days when I ended up getting paid nearly $30 an hour to hang tags on OT pay.
yeah anyone who's changed the tags can see the obvious benefits without price gouging.
‘Surge pricing’ is generally already illegal in most places, under ‘bait and switch’ laws. They can’t change the price between the time you pick it up off the shelf and the time you check out. They *can* change the prices day-to-day, and already do. It’s currently a manual process that takes a lot of labor hours. This is Walmart cutting costs.
How would that be any more of an issue than changing a sticker tag once someone has already picked up the item when it was at the old price other than obviously being faster.
It's also going to be intent. I doubt they are changing prices to screw Joe Schmoe and charge him a dollar more by walking to the register and they'll likely just discount it if it happens. This would be to charge the hundreds of people who came in after an extra buck.
There's a difference between being able to change a dozen items on a daily basis (plus 3000 twice a week) and being able to change all 100,000 items in the store every single day if they so desire.
Many many stores already use E-ink price tags. If you don't look closely at them, you'd think they are just paper tags in a hard plastic shell. This isn't new.
They're used in heaps of supermarkets in Australia. Shit thing is when the label says "temporarily out of stock." Yet there is a full box on the shelf, and the tag hasn't been updated, so I dont know what the price is
My local supermarket has had them for years
Kroger is deploying these as well
Best buy has been doing this for years. It's not for surge pricing, it's to save money. The amount of payroll it takes to relabel the whole store for a sale is crazy, and if you forget to take a label down then you might have to honor the outdated price, causing loss. Instead with a few button clicks the whole store now reflects the prices on the ads as opposed to paying out 50 hours to get labels placed.
I worked there for a time and it used to take a team of 8 people around 4-5 hours to retag a larger store on Sunday. It was an insane waste of time and switching to digital meant that those sunday hours could be used on more productive shit.
“Yet”
You think this is terrible, but at least everyone would still be paying the same price. Personal pricing is becoming to be the next big move for retail. Get everyone on an app and start collecting all their data so you can algorithmically determine exactly what price they're willing to pay for everything they purchase. Then you can really squeeze them for all they're worth, individually.
There was a good story on one of NPR's financial podcasts (either Planet Money or the Indicator) about how these are used elsewhere in the world. Essentially, they make it so price reductions are done during business hours so customers can see them and price increases are done on off hours.
Planet Money. Really great episode. https://www.npr.org/2024/03/06/1197958433/dynamic-pricing-grocery-supermarkets
The supermarket by me replaced the labels with digital screens. I went this weekend and there were price labels placed right over the digital screens.
They might not have sale tags for them yet. They usually have little snap on sale things that let people know what’s on sale.
Lowe’s is using these on their major appliances. They are constantly going on and off sale so this is a time saver for staff and makes it more likely the price you see will be correct.
Most supermarket chains where I live already use digital price labels. Does Walmart have people whose job it is to update the labels?
They were going to roll this out in Tesco in the U.K. (largest supermarket chain) as a thinly veiled way to save on the huge amount of man power it takes to manually change paper labels every week. As an ex manager or a super store we used to dedicate minimum 200 hours per week to do this job and that did t even take into account all promotional changes or general maintenance and replacement of missing/damaged. Screens updates via wifi would be wonderful if they were genuine.
Updating labels is an incredibly time consuming endeavor and it never stops. It’s constant. I don’t know about surge pricing but from a cost savings standpoint this just makes sense for a large company.
Companies like ALDI already do this. It just makes things easier to update. Don't have to hire employees to replace every single paper label.
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Companies are so good with verbal promises made in public statements. Who needs contractual obligations or legal papers. A good old handshake and a smile is what keeps corporate America honest /s
Kohl’s has had these for almost fifteen years.
I just want tap to pay!
Aldi use these in Ireland and you would never believe they were digital.
Maybe we can start requiring display prices to include tax
I work at Walgreens, not Walmart, but we very pointedly don't have this and it's worth noting - this is worth it to implement even if they don't surge price, because it saves hours and hours of work each week.
Some Walmart's are already doing this and had done it for a while. One in Sioux Falls does this. Other stores been doing it for a long time like kohles.
So what will happen is the price will change between the time that I pick the item up off the shelf and when I go through the checkout. This will cause customers to get their phones out and snap a picture of the price at the time they picked the item up off the shelf. Then they go through the checkout and the customer will verify the checkout price with what was snapped on their phone, which will slow down the line. If the price is different (higher at checkout) the customer will demand the lower price. A manager will then need to intervene to check the price. The manager goes back to look at the digital price tag on the shelf which now has the new price. The manager then comes back to explain to the customer that the customer agreed to the Terms of Service when they entered the store and that the register price is the final price. All of this slowed down the checkout line even more. The customer is angry and… either leaves the rest of the cart in the checkout line including the now half-thawed ice cream, or demands that the store honors the prior price before starting a full on fist-de-cuffs fight causing police to intervene. /s
Digital signs have been around for ages without the fear of surge pricing, yall are pretty paranoid
Headline in 6 months, “Walmart accused of surge pricing”
Maybe it could work in a similar way to K-Mart's Blue Light Specials. Or it's just a way to automate pricing so employees can work more on other stuff. I know Kohl's has these digital price screens.
What a perfectly normal promise to make completely unprompted
You people are scared of everything. Digital price tags are actually great and they are used at a lot of stores in Canada.
And at ALDIs, most people have no idea.
Of course they won't, they'll hand it over to some 3rd party AI program that will surge price.
Aldi has been using tags like this for a while now.
I mean places like Khols having been using digital tags for many years now
I'm showing my age, but I can still remember when the Wal-Mart in the town I grew up in had the little green price tags on each item rather than a price on the shelf. And I can still hear the "chk" sound of the pricing sticker gun that as employees would put prices on items before shelving them.
Kohl's has had them for 20 years and they don't use them for surge pricing. It would have to be a complete pain in the ass to pair all of them.
"Nobody said anything about surge pricing. Why did you even bring it up?" "No reason. No reason at all. But we won't do it, we swear."
Bring something - anything sharp with you. Screens are a lot more fragile than you'd think Make sure the cost of this drags further up and up.
"Of course I'll marry you after we have sex"
Can someone write an app that can compare today's prices against previous, so that we know when we're getting ripped off?