As an irrelevant side not, the producers of Sesame Street did issue a formal statement on the subject:

"They're puppets and puppets don't have a sexual orientation."

You have established that you're a pervert loser already, you can stop shouting it from the rooftops.

And you've admitted I'm right. You would show me, if only you had any.

There's a difference?

And if you don't, Microsoft's games aren't the problem.

It's not that it's not cost effective over time so much as the up front cost in one big bite. It would literally double the cost of opening a new store for us, is not more.

Then I guess we should burn the store to the ground and all go live in a cave and hunt dinner (or each other) with sharp sticks.

And dead batteries aren't a problem with the digital tags, they're a problem with managers who don't maintain their store competently. The managers who don't check for dead tags for 5 years (which is how long the batteries tend to last, since e-ink only uses power while you change the display) also won't check for outdated paper tags for that long, by which time they will have faded to the point of not being readable anyway.

Nonsense. This is about eliminating, in a Walmart, hundreds of man-hours of wages changing hundreds, if not thousands of paper tags every week. Any amount they could possibly make from dynamic pricing (even not counting the fines when someone is charged more at the register than they saw on the shelf) pales in comparison that being able to change every price in the store with a couple of mouse clicks.

Changing pricing during business hours is insanely stupid, since it leads to serious legal problems.

As opposed to a paper label in the same forgotten area that's years out of date and so faded you can't read it anyway? Or sale signs that nobody remembered to take down when the sale ended?

Lack of maintaining the store isn't a problem with digital labels, it's a problem with lazy, incompetent management.

Yeah, but that's true whether the tag gets moved or not. People don't read flashing neon signs bigger than they are that they have to walk around to come in the door, they certainly don't read tiny bin labels.

The biggest downside is the cost. Our stores have 40,000-60,000 items each, and those tags cost $5-20 apiece. That's hundreds of thousands to over a million dollars per store in initial investment. That's comparable to the cost of merchandise to open a new store.

Yes, digital tags would make it far easier and more efficient to get reamed by Weights & Measures for charging people more than the price they saw on the shelf.

The only people who talk about "dynamic pricing" based on the customer in a brick & mortar store are tech bros who don't know their ass from a hole in the ground about the real world of retail (or much else, really) spewing their insane fantasies, and pearl clutching idiots who are terrified of their own shadows.

Nobody with any retail experience would consider it because it's a bad idea.

Which is not, in any way, related to digital tags. Believe it or not, employees could change the paper tag during business hours, too! And management could even change the price in the computer system at the same time!!!! It's amazing what technology and a little elbow grease can do!!!!!!!!!!

Which is to say, unless one is droolingly stupid or clinically insane, prices will not change during business hours.

With paper labels, we have a specific process every week for price changes:

If the price is going down, we change it in the computers immediately, then put up the labels as there is time. If the price is going up, we prioritize updating the labels with a specific deadline it must be done by, and then change it in the computers. Either way, if there's a difference at the register, you're being charged less than the label.

If we had digital tags, it would all be 100% automatic outside of business hours, and you'd never see a difference at all.

E-ink doesn't require any power to display something. Only to change it. Batteries last for years.

Most places, they already are. There's no possible way you can show different prices to different people in a retail store, and not have someone show up at the register and get charged a different amount than they saw. And that's already illegal. Some places enforce it pretty strictly, too.

Here in California, dynamic pricing is just betting to get nailed to a cross by Weights & Measures. All it takes is for one person to see a price on a shelf tag (maybe while someone else is standing there), then get charged more at the register (maybe because the mythical facial recognition package misidentified them), and file a complaint to the state. Then the W&M folks will test it, and when they find it's a valid complaint, they will crawl up the company's ass with fines specifically intended to be high enough that the retailer will lose more than they ever possibly have hoped to gain from the dynamic pricing. Followed by regular, frequent audits (at least monthly, for years to come) to ensure it never, ever, ever happens again.

And if the price difference is more than $1, it's a felony, and the fines are even more, and the audits last even longer.

This is, as others have noted, not about dynamic pricing, which is a bad idea in a normal retail store like Wally World. This is about eliminating hundreds of hours of labor changing paper price tags on a weekly (if not more often) basis in stores with several hundred thousand items on its shelves.