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0 pointsthawaway18376y ago0 comments

How much additional labor is it to stick a new label the few times the price changes or the few times the location of items are changed, relative to programming those new prices and those new locations in a computer?

And would that add up to needing to hire even a single new employee, considering that most retail stocking is done by regular employees during their down times (it’s not like stores are gonna reprice and rearrange products on the fly during busy times).

And it’s not just the cost of a single eink sticker because they will get damaged or break down more frequently.

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8 comments · 2 top-level

mintplant6y ago· 5 in thread

> it’s not like stores are gonna reprice and rearrange products on the fly during busy times

Ah, but with networked electronic tags, they totally could try and maximize revenue even more by dynamically repricing products throughout the day.

mason556y ago

I wonder how that would work when the price changes. If I put something in my cart and then it rings up higher because the price went up while I was shopping I’m not going to be happy (and I assume that violates some kind of law or regulation).

I feel like you’d need to have people scan things as they picked them up to lock in the price. Then you’d need to automatically drop the price if the price goes down before the customer checks out (but don’t raise it if it goes up).

paranoidrobot6y ago

I imagine this is handled like price changes at stores that are open 24h - push out the price label changes, then a few hours later update the registers. It's unlikely that a customer will be in your store that long.

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jaclaz6y ago

An edge case, but some 30 years ago or so I was told that in some supermarkets in Brazil, there could be a central display changing prices daily (due to the hyperinflation) and besides supermarkets people went shopping as early as possible on shop openings to get "yesterday's prices":

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2010/10/04/130329523/how-...

>In practice, this meant stores had to change their prices every day. The guy in the grocery store would walk the aisles putting new price stickers on the food. Shoppers would run ahead of him, so they could buy their food at the previous day’s price.

ethbro6y ago

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Menu_cost

mintplant6y ago

Yes, not having to reprint price tags is an example of reducing menu cost. I assume that's what you're trying to say with this context-free Wikipedia link.

mstade6y ago· 1 in thread

Are these tags connected to a network? In that case I can definitely see the appeal for chain stores where you need consistent prices across stores in multiple cities. Set the price centrally, and have it come through everywhere without the need for any employees to go around setting new tags. Given all stores are chains these days (sadly) I can definitely imagine those savings add up to offset the cost of the tags. Especially over time and considering how massive some stores are.

monocasa6y ago

Yeah, they're normally hooked up to a low bandwidth network like an IR mesh or something.

Another benefit of that is that it leaves the only regular stocking left which is the easiest part to automate. At that point you can cut out the grocery department entirely and leave the 10% weird cases to the front end staff.

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