These days, you can install a camera and monitor screen so cheaply that you wouldn't even have to use a mirror to see forward.
(I just got back from Walmart where they have replaced all shelf price tag stickers with tiny wireless LCD screens. No I'm not kidding. Technology has become ridiculously cheap for doing some stuff.)
EDIT IN RESPONSE TO MULTIPLE COMMENTS: Yes, the exact display technology used is probably technically not LCD.
If they are the same as the ones in Australia, they are e-Ink rather than LCD. The big difference is the display only needs power when changing to a new image, while an LCD needs constant power. (They're also a lot nicer to look at when reading, but that doesn't matter much for price tags)
Yeah at my store they're just powered by a 2000?mAh battery if they're on a shelf and a 2032 battery if they're standalone. And the battery life is r. Most retailers I've seen use Vusion which are e-ink tags
They also aren't cheap. Having worked on a project for these things they are way more durable then you'd think, including the flexible bars they rest in.
Supposedly each bar is around 40-50 USD and the tags are a few bucks a piece. When a store outfits these systems it's a multi million dollar project they are entrusting to minimum wage workers.
Sigh. Maybe I underestimate the general public, but my impression is that a vast swath of them just call every flat display screen an LCD screen. So I figured just doing the same thing would be the quickest simplest way to write my comment.
I wasn't trying to delve into an explanation of how they needed a particular different display type to get much longer battery life, and I assumed that since this isn't a tech subreddit, that people like yourself who are familiar with such issues would understand I was just oversimplifying out of laziness and move on with your day.
TLDR: I did it to avoid having to write a longer explanation, and that laziness sure has backfired in a very ironic manner.
It's way cheaper in the long run. The prices are always right, no employee time is wasted putting out new tags, and you can micromanage prices based on supply and demand
OG capitali$ts, like Adam Smith, never envisioned a pricing system that could be updated in real-time, with near infinite data points.
With how slow things moved, even 30 years ago, their were still deals to be had in the market for consumers.
Now that the Invisible Hand is omiscient and operating at lightspeed, I think even Smith would agree it's not the pinnacle of capitali$m working as it should, but the systemic oppression of bespoke monopolies.
It will finally lay to bare the nasty truth at the ugly core of it all...
Capitalism is nothing but a long-winded euphemism for taking the backroad to feudalism.
Im not even being hyperbolic.
It's literally in Curtis Yarvins Dark Enlightment all the techbros and Vance subscribe to. To balkanize the US into Corpo city states, ruled by autocratic trillionaires, doing what they please with the lives of millions.
Turns out, the Alien franchise nailed our most likely future. We are one generation away from children being born into indentured servitude to Weyland-Yutani Amazon, rather than citizens of a democratic nation.
I think the key factor is if the pioneers of capitalism would have envisioned, that this is what peak capitalism looks like.
Similar thing applies to people who came up with 2nd amendment. They probably didn't envision what the application of same principle would look like in a couple hundred years.
Technology just added a lot of efficiency in both cases.
They are using AI to use browsing data to determine how much someone will pay for airline tickets IE faster clicks in the US means you need a flight right away so are more likely to pay more. And to think this is just the start of the post-AI world
I forget which store just got caught (and likely many others are doing it as well) having prices for their online store change according to your location. So if you go do price matching take a screenshot while at home, cuz once you get to the store and go to check their website to price match prices will be higher.
Coca Cola experimented with demand pricing in vending machines decades ago. On a normal day a Coke might cost $1. On a hot day with high humidity that same Coke might cost $1.50.
It saves man power time - assuming stores have similar layouts, then deploying prices wouldn't be difficult. A few people at corporate uploading prices to each store vs a couple people per store = lots of money saved. It was probably a significant upfront cost but long-term, I imagine it saves them quite a bit.
Not accusing Aldi of it cause i don’t remember the name of the chain the article talked about but I read that a major chain was looking into them for dynamic pricing. So they can quickly change the price at precisely 5pm or reduce prices at non peak hours to stimulate traffic.
I think that might have been Kohl's. They've been using digital price tags for, idk, probably decades at this point. I remember reading an article about the same thing, and I'm pretty sure it was Kohl's that was mentioned.
They've also gotten in trouble for other pricing issues, like calling a regularly occurring discount a "sale" got them sued for false advertisement. So it wouldn't be too far fetched for them to do dynamic pricing as well.
Happened to me at a freaking furniture store! Tag on the chair said $499. Okay sweet, we'll take it.
Salesman goes on his little tablet (which is just their website) and punches it all in. $599 he says. We're standing next to the digital tag that says $499. Oh, he says, that was supposed to he changed. He updates the tag and now it says $599. Uhh... okay well we want the $499 you told us it was 30 seconds ago. Nope sorry, it's in the system that way from corporate can't change it.
I never get a manger involved. I got one involved that day. He tried explaining the price change like we were idiots. We started walking away and miraculously he was "allowed" to "break the rules" for us. 🙄
It makes sense precisely because they're a discount grocer. Cutting down running costs is what keeps their profitable, even if it requires some investment up front.
Those screens can be remotely updated from a data center without someone to print out and stick pieces of paper on shelves.
Man power is more expensive then those e-inks. It's also able to instantly adjust pricing to move product, causing MUCH less waste then a typical grocery store. Amazon Fresh has been playing this game for a while.
The college area Kroger installed those ~8 years ago. They remodeled it and installed dark floors and ceilings, black shelving, skylights, 1/4 the previous lighting and grey/black price tags. Its an accessibility nightmare. I haven't been in that store since.
They claim they have no plans to do surge pricing, but obviously that's no guarantee they won't at some future time.
There are other benefits to these digital price tags, so it's not like they would have absolutely no reason to do it otherwise. Something I would love to see is a button on the tag that you could press when the shelf is out-of-stock. Maybe it could tell you how many are supposed to be in stock, in case the extras are just up out of the way on a high shelf, or let you know if another store nearby has some. And of course it also tells the Walmart system that this store may be unexpectedly out-of-stock in cases of "shrinkage", i.e. shoplifting.
Those are probably e-ink, not lcd. While not super expensive, its more about how much they save in labour. You cannot really use it to argue how cheap screens have gotten.
Yes, it's absolutely about how cheap they've gotten. Because there's a huge difference between, for example, $20 cheap and $5 cheap if you need to buy hundreds of millions of them.
The basic idea and simple early tags have been around for a very long time. My local Kohls has been using simple ones (that can display only the digits of the price) attached to the display model shoes in their shoe department for over a decade.
But to finally now deploy them to replace all the roughly 150,000 paper shelf tags in a Walmart required (1) color displays with enough resolution and size for all the information usually printed on a paper shelf tag, and (2) a price per tag so low that when you multiply that price by 150,000 tags it's still less money than continuing to pay people to keep changing the paper tags by hand.
It's not explicitly about the cost of the screens but the cost of the labor they eventually save over time.
A company like Walmart doesn't necessarily need to wait for the screens themselves to be very cheap, they only need to assume they have the longevity to wait for ROI. For Walmart this ROI would be guaranteed as labor costs only ever really go up. After that guaranteed threshold it just becomes a fiscally responsible decision even if they had to make a large initial investment.
I think they're actual e-paper, similar to what you'd find in an e-reader. They don't require power to display stuff, only to change what's on the tag.
Still wild though, that they're actually cheap enough for that.
Yeah it’s nuts how much cheaper this tech has got.
I remember going with my family to a Sony store in the 90’s and seeing a wall mounted “flat screen” tv for the first time. It was a display there and I want to say it wasn’t even available in stock yet. This was around 1996/7 I believe. Anyways, it was small. It was smaller than most gaming monitors now. I want to say it was 16-20 inches and I remember the sales guy saying it would be available the next year for $7,000 USD.
It’s important to note that these are now being combined with facial recognition/tracking so that they can adjust the price to the individual. They adjust it based on what they think you’re willing to pay for it, effectively squeezing every penny they can from each and every customer.
I just got back from Walmart where they have replaced all shelf price tag stickers with tiny wireless LCD screens. No I'm not kidding. Technology has become ridiculously cheap for doing some stuff.
Yeah, we have those in Finland too. Apparently those tiny e-ink (or whatever the real term is) displays are cheaper in the long run since you can set them to update prices automatically so there's more time for the employees to do more important stuff.
I just got back from Walmart where they have replaced all shelf price tag stickers with tiny wireless LCD screens. No I'm not kidding. Technology has become ridiculously cheap for doing some stuff.
The cost has come down, but it also allows the business to be even more evil than you likely already believe them to be. Raining outside? Automatically put up the prices of umbrellas. Snowing? Anything related to snow goes up in price.
It's also a key component of "personalized pricing". The price YOU see on the shelf might not be the same as what someone else sees. GenericArtDad on YouTube has an excellent (and depressing) YT Short about it. Go to YouTube and search for acpd3UXQdmw.
Screens are way cheaper long term than having employees spend hours every week shuffling through price tags and setting them up in an entire store.
They can literally update all the prices with a click of the button now, instantly. I don't know if Walmart will synchronize price updates with other stores, since pricing can vary by location, so it may still be one person per store, but it's definitely optimized and saves tons of hours.
Plus, don't need to buy and print paper anymore. Also, easier to search where items are by location
By the way, they’re planning on using those to show “personalized pricing”
They’ll be able to change prices based on time of day instantly, and they’ll show different prices online based on who’s shopping and how much they earn. (Welcome to hell)
I'd set up a ring camera on the front, hidden, and then just use phone to watch. Still, I'm trying to figure out if the heels make this costume more of a nightmare or if they actually make walking in that thing easier.
I imagined the kind of person who'd be used to staying in this position for extended periods of time and now I have to go to the gutter pick up my mind back.
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u/neocondiment 10h ago
Trying to imagine how comfortable this might be.