Walmart Announces Electronic Shelf Labels They Can Change Remotely (npr.org) 229
Walmart "became the latest retailer to announce it's replacing the price stickers in its aisles with electronic shelf labels," reports NPR.
"The new labels allow employees to change prices as often as every ten seconds." "If it's hot outside, we can raise the price of water and ice cream. If there's something that's close to the expiration date, we can lower the price — that's the good news," said Phil Lempert, a grocery industry analyst...
The ability to easily change prices wasn't mentioned in Walmart's announcement that 2,300 stores will have the digitized shelf labels by 2026. Daniela Boscan, who participated in Walmart's pilot of the labels in Texas, said the label's key benefits are "increased productivity and reduced walking time," plus quicker restocking of shelves...
As higher wages make labor more expensive, retailers big and small can benefit from the increased productivity that digitized shelf labels enable, said Santiago Gallino, a professor specializing in retail management at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School. "The bottom line, at least when I talk to retailers, is the calculation of the amount of labor that they're going to save by incorporating this. And in that sense, I don't think that this is something that only large corporations like Walmart or Target can benefit from," Gallino said. "I think that smaller chains can also see the potential benefit of it."
Indeed, Walmart's announcement calls the tech "a win" for both customers and their workers, arguing that updating prices with a mobile app means "reducing the need to walk around the store to change paper tags by hand and giving us more time to support customers in the store." Professor Gallino tells NPR he doesn't think Walmart will suddenly change prices — though he does think Walmart will use it to keep their offline and online prices identical.
The article also points out you can already find electronic shelf labels at other major grocers inlcuding Amazon Fresh stores and Whole Foods — and that digitized shelf labels "are even more common in stores across Europe." Another feature of electronic shelf labels is their product descriptions. [Grocery analyst] Lempert notes that barcodes on the new labels can provide useful details other than the price. "They can actually be used where you take your mobile device and you scan it and it can give you more information about the product — whether it's the sourcing of the product, whether it's gluten free, whether it's keto friendly. That's really the promise of what these shelf tags can do," Lempert said.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader loveandpeace for sharing the article.
"The new labels allow employees to change prices as often as every ten seconds." "If it's hot outside, we can raise the price of water and ice cream. If there's something that's close to the expiration date, we can lower the price — that's the good news," said Phil Lempert, a grocery industry analyst...
The ability to easily change prices wasn't mentioned in Walmart's announcement that 2,300 stores will have the digitized shelf labels by 2026. Daniela Boscan, who participated in Walmart's pilot of the labels in Texas, said the label's key benefits are "increased productivity and reduced walking time," plus quicker restocking of shelves...
As higher wages make labor more expensive, retailers big and small can benefit from the increased productivity that digitized shelf labels enable, said Santiago Gallino, a professor specializing in retail management at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School. "The bottom line, at least when I talk to retailers, is the calculation of the amount of labor that they're going to save by incorporating this. And in that sense, I don't think that this is something that only large corporations like Walmart or Target can benefit from," Gallino said. "I think that smaller chains can also see the potential benefit of it."
Indeed, Walmart's announcement calls the tech "a win" for both customers and their workers, arguing that updating prices with a mobile app means "reducing the need to walk around the store to change paper tags by hand and giving us more time to support customers in the store." Professor Gallino tells NPR he doesn't think Walmart will suddenly change prices — though he does think Walmart will use it to keep their offline and online prices identical.
The article also points out you can already find electronic shelf labels at other major grocers inlcuding Amazon Fresh stores and Whole Foods — and that digitized shelf labels "are even more common in stores across Europe." Another feature of electronic shelf labels is their product descriptions. [Grocery analyst] Lempert notes that barcodes on the new labels can provide useful details other than the price. "They can actually be used where you take your mobile device and you scan it and it can give you more information about the product — whether it's the sourcing of the product, whether it's gluten free, whether it's keto friendly. That's really the promise of what these shelf tags can do," Lempert said.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader loveandpeace for sharing the article.
Savings will be minimal, IMHO (Score:3)
Humans still have to stock the shelves and inspect the inventory. For now, anyway. [robohub.org]
Re:Savings will be minimal, IMHO (Score:5, Insightful)
No way in hell those savings are getting passed down to the customer. Don't know why Walmart is making a big deal because I've seen digital labels in Zehr's in Canada for a few years now. It really gives me a warm feeling knowing prices can be raised with a few mouse clicks instead of paying someone to physically apply new labels.
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Here, new price-labels appear every school-holiday season: For 2 weeks or more, packet chips, chocolates and other confectionery aren't sold at the 'discounted' price.
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Walmart already has the capability of raising or lowering prices for a two-week period. Their system is pretty low effort already, just print new labels and slide them into the shelf tags. Sure, this will make it even less expensive for them to change prices. But Walmart has a reputation to uphold. They're not going to suddenly start gouging customers after relentlessly lowering them for the past 60 years. Walmart shoppers are VERY price-conscious. Those who aren't, already don't shop there. Those shoppers
Re: Savings will be minimal, IMHO (Score:5, Informative)
Way back when I worked retail about 15 years ago, and this was what they call a medium box store, we changed the prices every week. Generally there were three of us, it took an hour to do, and it was outside of regular opening hours. But keep in mind, medium box is a LOT smaller than e.g. Walmart superstores; probably a lot more work there. The labels came from some corporate office and were distributed based on the planograms, I'd imagine Walmart does the same. For these labels, you likely don't even need anybody to be in the store at all to change them unless the planogram changes, which isn't often at all, in which case you'd just need somebody to reprogram maybe a handful of them once in a blue moon, which is likely only a tiny fraction of the work involved in planogram changes, which also includes moving the physical goods around.
So yeah, I'd imagine it saves a bit. More than that, you're also less likely to end up with incorrect prices, which happens a fair bit because somebody inevitably misses something when a price changes, either up or down.
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15 years ago, we got maybe 200 price changes a week on an inventory of 40,000 items. The last five years, it's been several times that, sometimes ten times. Costs at all levels, manufacturing, shipping, everything, have been very volatile lately.
Walmart is talking about investing billions of dollars in this stuff, and it looks to me like a very wise investment that will pay for itself within a few years.
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They're not going to suddenly start gouging customers after relentlessly lowering them for the past 60 years.
Which is why WalMart has turned in record profit for the previous 3 quarters of over 5 billion per quarter? Admittedly, that's not as much of a record profit as PetroChem and other price gougers have turned in. Who knew that if the Republican House majority promised no investigations into prices but lots for laptops, big business would raise the prices to hell and gone and the 'pubs would blame Joe for it?
Who could have possibly seen that coming?
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Which is why WalMart has turned in record profit
Yes. Walmart is the most profitable retailer in the history of the world by charging lower prices, and capturing much of the market.
Nothing says, "I know nothing about business," better than believing that higher prices automatically mean higher profits.
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Remind me, why are so many people upset with Walmart about driving the mom-and-pop stores out of business? It's because the mom-and-pop stores can't compete with Walmart's low prices. Yes, Walmart is profitable. But at the same time, they *do* pass along the savings to customers. If that weren't true, the mom-and-pops wouldn't be having problems competing.
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Yes, it happens, on occasion Walmart's price will be higher than _somebody_ else's price. But I have never, ever seen them gouge.
If you're worried about being arrested or having your arm dislocated, you must be a different kind of shopper than I am. Those fears have never once crossed my mind, though I have seen Walmart security detain someone. In that instance, it was quite obvious that the person was pushing a shopping cart full of stolen merchandise out the doors.
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Are you getting your news on Facebook?
Walmart isn't going to prosecute over a box of pudding.
The incident of the woman with dementia is real, but the officer was charged for a crime in that case. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/0... [nytimes.com] These incidents are not the norm for any store, not even Walmart.
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It really gives me a warm feeling knowing prices can be raised with a few mouse clicks instead of paying someone to physically apply new labels.
It's called cost savings. How much do you think Walmart spends in a month just on the labels? Add in how much it costs to have people wandering about and (hopefully) applying the correct label to the shelf. If they can do the price change remotely that frees up the person to wander the store and look busy.
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And significantly reduces the error rate.
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No way in hell those savings are getting passed down to the customer.
Hmmm...Walmart is actually known for doing just that. Yes of course, they're going to make a profit, as they always have. But they literally stake their reputation on price competition. If they weren't passing along at least some of those savings to customers, they wouldn't be in business. People would stop going there, like they stopped going to Sears.
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https://www.foodandwine.com/wa... [foodandwine.com]
It turns out they could have lowered prices long ago but chose not to.
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No, that's not what your story says. It actually says they are lowering prices for some groceries to what they were before 2020. This does not mean that they could have done it sooner.
I once worked in the IT department of a large department store chain. One thing I learned about pricing was that, when we had a sale, it was the manufacturers that lowered their prices to us. Our margin stayed the same for the reduced-price items. In other words, the store isn't where the price flexibility is, it's the manufac
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One thing I learned about pricing was that, when we had a sale, it was the manufacturers that lowered their prices to us.
That isn't the case for us, usually (though it does happen). Determining what to put on sale and for how much is a lot more complicated than that, overall. That's why we have buyers, and not spreadsheets.
What Walmart is doing here, is pressuring manufacturers / suppliers to lower their prices.
Something Walmart has been especially known for, and good at, for decades.
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At the height of the pandemic, the cost of getting one shipping container across the Pacific had gone up to over 20 times what it was pre-pandemic, and (our) vendors that usually get in a hundred or more at a time were limited to two per day through the port.
We are just now seeing costs dropping after the insanity of the pandemic. Costs at all levels went up a lot, especially shipping costs (and a whole lot of what Walmart sells comes from overseas, yes, even food). Wages have gone up quite a bit, too, as w
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It's a small press release on their own website that the pilot program is being extended to more stores. The commentariat acting like it's special is not Walmat's problem.
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Kroger was playing around with this stuff at least 10 years ago. They even thought far enough ahead in the concept to try to detect when someone on the guest wireless was doing a price lookup through an app, and adjust the price on the shelf right there. HTTPS everywhere kind of shot that to sunshine, but the digital shelf tags have been a thing for some time now.
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Re:Savings will be minimal, IMHO (Score:5, Informative)
The scenario they offer, "surge" pricing with high demand, would actually be illegal in many states, criminal in some. Online, you can get away with it, because when you make the purchase, the price you've seen is the price you pay.
In a brick & mortar setting, if you see a price on the shelf, pick up the item, shop for a while longer, and get charged more at the register, that's illegal. In California, it's criminal, with steep fines. If the register price is $1 more than the posted price, it's a felony, with steeper fines (granted, Walmart won't care that much about that), followed by at least monthly inspections by Weights & Measures, that have to be attended by the store manager personally, and repeated fines for every violation. The record keeping requirements (the store is required to verify posted prices themselves daily are enough to make a measurable difference is payroll budgets. And, I suspect, if compliance is quick and effective, they could eventually force the closure of the store.
So, nobody who has actually dealt with that in the real world would ever believe it's a good idea to raise prices for any reason in a store the size of a Walmart during business hours. Lower? Sure, no problem. Pleasant surprise for the customer, regulators don't give a damn. Raise it? Be prepared to add court appearances to your schedule (and given that Walmart will almost certainly be controlling these from corporate, not at the store level, it won't be just store managers getting served with subpoenas).
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It would be nice if they went the other way with it - Kroger at one point in a single store was conducting feasibility of having a guest wifi network that was running filtering on it to find API calls for price checking apps, which could then be used to instantly deliver a coupon to your Kroger app to price match, or in the case of digital shelf tags, update the price in real time - saves you from having to go across town to save a dollar, and Kroger still gets the sale with a slightly reduced margin. Ever
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If people will pay more, why wouldn't a store charge more?
Because the store will lose market share and customers won't come back. Eventually, the store won't have enough income to cover fixed costs.
Walmart became the most successful retailer in the history of the world by offering the lowest prices.
Walmart has significantly higher profits per store than Whole Foods. They make less profit per item but sell in much higher volumes.
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Yeah but I'm surprised they don't step up that game as well. If they've got a digital label up they might as well RFID the bins and let the gun find the holes instead of having the employee search and match the code. For that matter when they have mixed pallets and return carts why not have a system to optimize distribution across X number of carts each grouped with an efficient return plan.
A poor manager would say "screw that, let them work for a living" but a smart one says... yes, every step closer to re
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What makes you think they're not doing all that? (They do, mostly at the warehouse level, and have for years. Including RFID tags at the case level, especially on high theft items like razors, but the tags are too bulky and expensive for per item use.)
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You have clearly never worked in retail. Stocking shelves is not the same activity as changing price labels. They are separate tasks, and whether or not one is performed by humans has no effect on the need to do the other.
We have 22 stores, and we spend several hundred man-hours a week keeping up with routine price changes. It's a big expense. With electronic price labels, it would be done in a matter of seconds, with one mouse click by one employee. That's a big savings.
Re: Savings will be minimal, IMHO (Score:2)
and you will be able to show the final price (tax included) in the label, since it's so easy to change, right?
right?
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The difficulty in the US in showing the final price, including tax, isn't having to change the labels often, it's that there are a half dozen or more tax authorities for each location, making it complicated to compute, and when you buy multiple items, taxes are computes on the total, not on each individual item. So adding the "tax included" prices will not necessarily be the same as the price at the register.
And if the register system computes it wrong, it's not that big a deal if an audit turns it up later
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Are you unaware of how e-ink or LCDs work?
Anything they can show on a paper shelf tag, they can show on a digital replica of a paper shelf tag. And they don't have to spend time and money on printing them all, and then having employees shuffle about the store retagging the shelves.
If you live in a jurisdiction with sales tax / VAT, the tax should really not be a surprise to you when checking out. You literally pay it on everything you buy.
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And they don't have to spend time and money on printing them all, and then having employees shuffle about the store retagging the shelves.
But they do need to either wire up all the shelves or keep a load of spares around for when the batteries run low.
If you live in a jurisdiction with sales tax / VAT, the tax should really not be a surprise to you when checking out. You literally pay it on everything you buy.
Yes, but if things are as complicated as tasutin says up there ^ how is anyone supposed to know how much something costs just by looking at the price tag?
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Batteries in such devices can last for several years.
Is this really necessary? (Score:5, Insightful)
"If it's hot outside, we can raise the price of water and ice cream. "
Greedy, greedy pieces of s**t! I know it's the 'American Way' to charge as much as you think you can get away with, but it just seems morally wrong to jack up the price on items, just because people might need -or even just want- them more. Just sickening greed. (In what way does increased demand increase your costs to the point that you wouldn't get more revenue anyway from increased sales? This whole "demand drives cost" thing has always sounded to me like capitalist bullcrap.)
And how can you even justify changing the price of anything every 10sec? That's just insane. They probably won't that often, but I absolutely wouldn't put it past them. This has the potential to create havoc with your shopping list, if you've budgeted for a certain expenditure for the visit.
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They'll start watching what you buy (they already are) and upcharging for shit they know you want next the second they think they can get away with without backlash (ask Wendys). Custom per person pricing is what they want, to extract the maximum possible amount of money per "customer".
All they're talking about is "surge pricing" which is gouging (greedflation), and the shit you already see shitty services like hotels and ride sharing do and what everything everywhere was during the pandemic.
Re:Is this really necessary? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Weights & Measures would find it quite trivial to prove during one of their regular inspections (which are not announced in advance, BTW). They'll just take a picture of each label when they pick up an item, and document what they were charged at the register. All sworn under oath by people who are automatically credible.
The fines can be brutal, the other aspects of the consent decree much more so.
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That occurred to me, but:
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Oh they'll care. I've had the register price turn up higher than the shelf price more than once, or two for the price of ones that don't show up. The law says they have to give you the posted shelf price. Otherwise it's false advertising and that will get them in trouble.
Given the majority of the population has cameras with them all the time I don't think the raise the prices while the customers are on the way to the register will work out well for the store that tries to cheat people.
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1. what difference does it make? They can make sure they never have a legal problem by only changing prices outside of business hours. Update the shelf tags before store open when there aren't any customers that could possibly be in that situation. And if, for some reason you absolutely must update a price in the middle of a day, have someone go out there and take all the items off the shelf and put a "sorry out of stock" thing on there, wait a decent interval until you're well past whatever the average
Re: Is this really necessary? (Score:2)
Re:Is this really necessary? (Score:5, Interesting)
Also, what happens if the price changes between the time you pick it up off the shelf and the time it gets scanned at checkout? False advertising? Fraud?
In California, criminal charges against the company if Weights & Measures catch it. If it's more than $1 higher, felony charges. The fines wouldn't be a big deal for Walmart, but the monthly (or more) inspections and brutal record keeping requirements for years afterwards would be.
No brick & mortar store of any size in their right mind would raise prices during business hours.
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Sure, but now I have to take a photo of every price tag as I shop. I'm going to take that into account, so I will be less willing to buy large numbers of items. Stores like Walmart depend on impulse buys from foot traffic. But now that impulse is going to fight with laziness, and I think Walmart will lose.
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Depending on the state, yes. Someone above [slashdot.org] talked about exactly this in California - it's steep fines and consent decrees if found guilty. And if the price difference is more than $1 it's a felony (according to them).
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This is exactly it. We have these things in a number of local grocery and hardware stores and I hate it because there's no such thing as "a price" for something anymore. It's all algorithmic, designed to wring as much cash out of people as possible. It's disgusting.
Incidentally this is why I use Keepa with Amazon, so I can see the pricing games and ensure I'm getting the right price.
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We have these things in a number of local grocery and hardware stores and I hate it because there's no such thing as "a price" for something anymore. It's all algorithmic, designed to wring as much cash out of people as possible. It's disgusting.
To be fair, it's a return to roots. 3000 years ago, you would deal with a guy sitting on a rug selling jugs of olive oil using the same strategy.
How much for the olive oil?
(He looks you over for a while-) "For you.... five pieces of silver."
Maybe WalMart can get rid of price tags altogether and put a tiny interactive hologram of a guy like that in front of every product.
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Nah, just do it in bulk at the register. Image the whole cart, inventory it, and start the barter. Would be far more efficient than literally haggling over every single item with a soulless hologram that has nothing but time on it's hands.
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I'd be more bothered that shops cartel and all agree that ice cream is X now, meaning chance on a hot day to find it cheaper is lower.
If you self scan, does the lower price stick and you see the difference at the pay point? Or is display price going to lag for an hour? In the UK you pay the lower price if the display was wrong or they can refuse to sell.
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Which is marginally better than being an idiot. Like you.
I call "bullshit" (Score:2)
Smaller shops still use stick-on price tags: The cost of (buying and) operating an inventory/pricing system is more than the time-saved.
If retail chains cared about customer support, they'd employ people to do that. Less busy-work means low-level employees will work fewer hours while C-level employees get a bonus for 'saving' money.
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Smaller shops still use stick-on price tags: The cost of (buying and) operating an inventory/pricing system is more than the time-saved.
I guess this is why the smaller shops have lower prices. Big stores are doomed once people realize they can get the same stuff cheaper at the smaller shops. Unless you're wrong of course.
Huh, surprised they need electronic signs (Score:2)
I thought they had that bouncy yellow smiley face ball to take care of that - they feature it in their commercials. It would bounce on top of a price display, causing a new lower price to instantly appear. Also it would bounce on top of redundant employees and crush their skulls (but only after verifying their souls had already been crushed).
How long until ... (Score:2)
How long until these things are cracked by someone? then we might see some prices jumping around.
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That was my first thought. There's going to be a lot of folk wandering the aisles with a Flipper Zero, looking for weaknesses.
What do the electronic labels use to communicate with the shop's server? Bluetooth, wi-fi, or something else?
De-auth attacks are the least of a Flipper Zero's capability. Someone will get themselves a job stocking shelves at night, and record all the chatter going on with tomorrow's prices, specials, etc.
Sooner or later someone will find a way to send a reset command to all the label
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I'm pretty sure Walmart knows how to use TLS. Go ahead, sniff all the wifi and bluetooth traffic you like - if the internal protocol uses cryptography in any meaningful way, you just filled a lot of flash cells with pseudo-random trash unless their keys get compromised or use shitty breakable ciphers.
So what happens if the price changes after (Score:5, Interesting)
I put it in my cart?
That would be illegal where I live making the product free if it was under $10.
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That would be illegal where I live
I suspect it is illegal in most places but how will any of us prove it? I don't want to have to wear a body cam everytime I go shopping.
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Most states that care about such things have a Bureau of Weights & Measures that conduct inspections on a regular basis. And getting caught is a big deal.
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Walmart spends a decade stalling your court case.
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Walmart spends a decade stalling the state's court case.
I wish them all the luck in the world on that. They'll need it.
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It's not my court case. The way the law is written is that if Walmart wants to avoid ticketing all the items they must abide by the law. If found guilty they will need to ticket all the items in their store. All I have to do is file a complaint with a government agency.
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This will be used for evil. (Score:3)
Well, this is bullshit.
"It was $1.49 when I pulled it from the shelf! Why is it ringing up at $1.59?"
"Market forces, dear. Gotta run to the register quicker, next time."
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Until they get caught, fined, and forced to undergo monthly (at least) inspections by Weights & Measures, and have store employees verify several hundred prices every day, with detailed records, for years to come.
Be a contest to see what hurts them more, that, or the news coverage (which would be extensive, this being Walmart) of the company abandoning 60 years of commitment to having the very lowest prices around.
No, they'll raise prices after hours, or in the slowest part of the wee hours in 24 hour s
Seriously? (Score:3, Insightful)
"If it's hot outside, we can raise the price of water and ice cream." --- Wow. That tells you all you need to know about that dude and probably Walmart in general's character. How do humans have such a crappy design?
Re:Seriously? (Score:4, Informative)
That nobody at Walmart said that tells me all I need to know about you, and your (in)ability to read and understand simple English.
Let me complete the quote, with emphasis on the parts you missed (or left out in your orgiastic need to hate on Walmart):
“If it’s hot outside, we can raise the price of water and ice cream. If there's something that’s close to the expiration date, we can lower the price — that’s the good news,” said Phil Lempert, a grocery industry analyst .
The emphasized part is what makes you look stupid or dishonest (or both).
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Ok I fucked that up badly, because I just skimmed through. Why did he say “we” though?
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Why do propagandists lie?
Why do people believe them anyway?
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How do humans have such a crappy design?
Because it's not a design, obviously. It just happened. There's enough stupidity in the layout to prove that many times over. It's amazing any living creatures work at all we're such hodgepodges of horseshit.
Soon: pricing for individual customers? (Score:3)
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Same problems with Weight & Measures, who would quickly send two people for inspections, one with a history of being a big spender, the other miserly.
Believe it or not, nearly every section of shelving in Walmart will have multiple people in front of it at the same time, at least occasionally.
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Usually it's the opposite - if you're a big spender they don't want you going anywhere else, because stores and store managers are measured on year-over-year identical sales growth percent. If you piss off your big spenders and they go elsewhere, you've just put a big ding in your own career.
This is why loyalty programs exist - to send you coupons on things you buy, so that you continue to buy them from that store. Oh, and the data rape. Don't ever forget about the data rape.
Legal speedbump (Score:5, Interesting)
You can't update prices in the middle of the day. At least you can't raise them. You'll run into legal issues with mislabeled pricing when someone picks something up for $1.19 and then gets charged $1.29.
Wunderbar. (Score:2)
Unregulated Capitalism... (Score:3)
poisons everything it touches.
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As opposed to communism, which drags everything it touches out behind the barn, shoots it in the head, then sodomizes the corpse?
Why is this even an issue? (Score:2)
e-Ink displays have been used by shops for ages, and before that, battery powered LCD price tags. For example, one HEB location had all their prices on LED tags so they could just have someone run around with a scanner-like tool, that scanned the barcode, then transmitted an IR sequence to each tag to change the price. It took a bit to hit every tag, but it saved time of physically switching tags.
I have seen Best Buys use e-Ink displays to change prices on stuff in real time. Because the display is e-Ink
The opportunities for corruption are endless... (Score:2)
This reminds me of the Dukes of Hazard TV show where the corrupt deputy had a remote controlled speed limit sign and as soon as the Duke Boys were too close to slow down, he would drop the speed limit.
I can imagine the price flipping after I put something in my basket.
Desperate justification. (Score:2)
Or you could just pick up the
When the Revolution came (Score:4, Insightful)
"If it's hot outside, we can raise the price of water and ice cream. If there's something that's close to the expiration date, we can lower the price — that's the good news," said Phil Lempert, a grocery industry analyst...
"When the Revolution came, children, Phil Lempert, a grocery industry analyst, was the first one put up against a wall."
Taxes included? (Score:2)
The argument has always been whenever this comes up that it's too hard to update all the price tags to include taxes from store to store and area to area and so on.
Is this going to then include taxes so you see the FINAL price of the goods? Surely an electronic price tag updated in-store where they can calculate the tax at the register anyway should be able to properly update this?
What they say vs what they mean (Score:2)
"make it easier to change prices based on demand and layoff some staff to save money"
What help do most people need beyond "Can you tell me where to find x?"
Given WalMart's size and fame, I wonder how long it will take before someone figures out how to hack the system, assuming it already hasn't been done elsewhere. It probably tied into the computer system that runs the reg
Re:paper doesn't quit working... (Score:4, Interesting)
So if the system goes down, do they have to close the store, or will people just go ahead and play the "shopping lottery"?
How long do you think before their neato new system gets hacked and posted prices *really* go nuts?
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Don't these things use e-ink technology? If the label loses power, it would still display the last price that was uploaded.
Seriously, does is even really matter, though? Most Walmart customers will probably doing the "self-checkout from the app" thing 5-10 years from now, meaning that they'll see the "real" price on their smartphone when they scan the barcode.
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Don't these things use e-ink technology? If the label loses power, it would still display the last price that was uploaded.
I believe that is the case, for the good ones. If not, it will be soon enough. Nothing else is practical.
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If "the system" goes down, you can't change prices until it's back up. The labels store whatever data they're programmed with, without any connection. Individual labels will inevitably fail, yes, but unless the whole system is garbage, not often, and not all at once.
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mabye they'll have better tech...
Fortunately we're talking about that quality retailer Walmart here, rather than some company known for cutting every possible expense to drive prices and expenses lower.
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Not until it can run Doom. I mean, really, if a pregnancy test can run it, surely these things can.
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More like price inflation.
It used to be that Walmart would change a price once a year or so - sometimes higher, sometimes lower.
Today prices are changing weekly.
At this trajectory there will be daily price changes soon and electronic tags are non-optional.
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Walmart's employees aren't there to help customers, they're there to stock shelves and clean up messes. That's why they get surly when you ask for help - it actually interferes with what they get their performance reviews on.
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Wendy’s tried it and got called out. https://www.npr.org/2024/02/28... [npr.org]
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Fast food can - legally - get away with it, because when you pay for an order is simultaneous with when you see the price on the menu board.
Walmart, not so much. Pick something up, shop for another hour, and get charged more than you saw, and Weights & Measures will be looking for blood.
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That would require abandoning 60 years of being committed, above all else, to low prices. [cascade.app] The core value that has made them the largest retailer in the world (including online, they're still well ahead of Amazon).
I'm skeptical.
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Well, the best way would be to snap some shelf tag pictures, and then compare them to the receipt. And if they aren't less-than-or-equal, you report them to your state's department of weights and measures for a jolly good lawyerly ass pounding in state court, followed by massive fines and consent decrees for years of voluntary and unannounced inspections from that same department of weights and measures.
Extra credit if it's a multi-state chain, so they can take that shit to federal court under advertising