AFAIK, they use RFID now so they must be changed manually but maybe someday, they will devise a price-gouging scheme involving face detection and tracking people with security cameras.
“Here comes this lady that always buys four cans of dog food despite the last price increase! Let’s notch it up it by another 20%!”
No they are wifi controlled
They are also IR controlled. A lot of them have a little window on the front of the unit, and an array of transmitters in the ceiling.
Probably different models for different sets. The set I work with are purely wifi. They have a light on them to blink is the only extra thing they do
IR on them does sound stupid though, in a store environment that can be blocked rather easily
Obviously the way to combat this is to organize dozens or more people who just walk around, load up shopping carts, then leave the store without buying anything. They can pay people to put everything back.
Those have existed here for a long time and we got none of those problems.
Yet. Infrastructure on this scale moves slowly and the transparentness of pricing changes on short time lines in physical stores is hard to track. It exists in emergency economies - we call it price gouging - but that’s usually quite obvious. The idea of dynamic pricing has existed forever - hotels, airline flights, movie tickets, taxi rides, even electric rates. As technology advances it offers the opportunity to use the technology to shorten the time window for pricing changes more and more. An extra two tenths of a percent profit seems like a trivial amount. Amazon and Walmart combined for more than a trillion dollars in sales last year. 0.2% is a very non-trivial $2 Billion. If it becomes available, it will be exploited.
Haven’t digital price tags been used for decades? I’m sure these will be more high tech, but I remember ones like this at least 20 years ago
Yeah these have existed for a while.
I think the only thing new is that walmart previously talked about actually implementing “on demand pricing” and now that they’re adding digital price tags they could actually do it.
I think this will be potentially be a good thing (at first) as you won’t have people wasting their life away just endlessly walking around the store updating the price of every individual item for 40 hours a week.
Things will get messy when they start price gouging based on current inventory, weather, holidays or emergency situations.
Things will get deeply dystopian if they start scanning customers as they enter and change the price based on their skin color, gender, clothing, or estimated net worth.
Work in retail without e-ink and a lot of the concerns people have here already happen with paper. We do full store paper price tag updates daily, also someone will go around with a scanner making sure prices are up to date with website and print new sheets if not.
Normal days will consist of 3-5 new batches of tickets with the full store update batch containing normally ~10-20 a4 sheets. This isn’t a huge store either I imagine most wallmarts would have more products.
The prices already update super frequently and e-inks don’t really change that. It basically just cuts out the printing and placing, the person running around with the scanner now updates prices.
I think for workers they are nice as they reduce the chance of paper cuts and the back and leg pain from changing the 100s of bottom shelf tags.
The benefit for stores is they likely don’t need to hire as many people, less training and possibly reduced material cost over time as the paper would probably add up.
I’m not worried about e-ink price tags. Aldi has them. I’m worry if it says, use your phone to find special offers only for you.
It’s bound to happen. Why waste hours replacing tags when you can just change what the shelf says when the prices change.
But this article is so pro Walmart it’s crazy.
Retailers argue that these innovations increase efficiency and reduce costs in an industry known for its slim profit margins.
Slim profit margins my ass. Walmarts gross profit for the twelve months ending July 31, 2024 was $163.786B,
I think the main concern is that this is a step towards normalizing extremely frequent price changes, a la Uber surge pricing.
That’s exactly what this is. All stores will eventually do this and prices will fluctuate throughout the day.
isn’t it pretty much what amazon’s been doing since the beginning? the difference being there’s no “app” like camel yet to track prices over time at a single store
but yea, still another reason not to go to walmart. how do they mitigate the problem of something being $X when you put it in your cart, and the price being X+whatever by the time you get through the 2 mile long line at one of the 2 open registers?
