Most of them can't be updated by someone in the store headquarters remotely. Someone has to take a bluetooth programmer device around and program each one by hand. And if they're doing that, they might as well just take a handheld label printer or sheet of labels.
Benefit of the labels is they're clearer than e-ink, brighter, and more colorful (more sales)
You can also do cool time limited actions without having an employee go and manually change prices. For example in Kaufland stores in Germany at 19:00 the price of the Fruit and Vegetables is automatically reduced.
I would hate to put something in my cart that was $5 at the time I put it into my cart only to have it be $8 by the time I get to the till.
So the argument being that they don't have to pay someone to go around and update it and instead can just do it centrally?
I think the Amazon stores do this, and I would assume that if anyone Amazon would set that up properly.
I also thought I saw somewhere the idea that the displays let them tinker with the price more often instead of on a weekly basis when the flyers come out.
Yest they can, since the '90s (in Europe at least). Where did you get this misinformation?
The programing device you saw is only for initial pairing or resetting the label, but other than that, they can always be updated via 2.4GHz radio or infrared base-stations (depending on manufacturer) mounted throughout the shop.
Source: used to work in the industry many, many years ago
Are there any special keywords or sources for finding them in Europe?
https://blog.jgc.org/2011/11/turning-ge-color-effects-g-35-c...
These are also serially linked but the first step is to give each lamp an address and then messages just get passed on until consumed by the appropriate lamp.
Really cool!
