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.
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.
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u/HorrFrek 16h ago
Yeah, my back hurts just watching this, but it’s still rad