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Cuttlersan ,

Rightfully worried IMO

ChaoticNeutralCzech ,

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%!”

Pyro ,

No they are wifi controlled

ChaoticNeutralCzech ,

In the Czech Republic, BILLA uses them and they respond to the RFID reader on my phone. It’s a different kind though, most have black-white-red displays.

TachyonTele , (edited )

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,

thurstylark ,

I think the main concern is that this is a step towards normalizing extremely frequent price changes, a la Uber surge pricing.

TachyonTele ,

I edited in another thought. I agree with that fear, that’s obviously the concern. I didn’t feel the need to repeat it.

YurkshireLad ,

That’s exactly what this is. All stores will eventually do this and prices will fluctuate throughout the day.

solsangraal ,

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?

Tabzlock ,

Paper ticket stores already do this, its just a more work for the workers than e-ink.

floofloof ,

And personalized pricing, based on your profile and what they think they can get you to pay.

t3rmit3 ,

I can’t wait for them to get sued into the ground because their AI is changing prices based on skin color.

spizzat2 , (edited )

So, if I grab an item off the shelf and browse around the store for a while, is the price going to be the price currently displayed or the price when I grabbed it?

If it’s the current price, what’s the point of a price tag? If I can’t actually know the price until checkout, then showing me the price is kind of a useless bit of data. I also suspect that the “speak to a manager” types would make that a major headache for stores.

If it’s the price when I grabbed it, how are they keeping track of that? I see two ways of handling that: one requires that you use their app to shop, and the other requires cameras and “machine vision” that are still unreliable, at best. The former seems more likely, but I doubt either is going to sit well with customers.

Edit: someone pointed out that it might not actually display a price, and you’d have to scan it to get your price. Kind of like the first option, but I think it’s going to turn off less tech savvy customers.

I haven’t seen that aspect addressed in any articles about the “feature”.

Tabzlock ,

Take a photo of it, I work with paper but we change our tags frequently. We often have prices changed when a customer reaches checkout. I’ve also had times where a customer came back to check a shelf tag after I just updated it. I honored the previous price those times as I was still holding the tickets but its not a guarantee even in paper stores.

Eggyhead ,

It’ll be exciting to see prices temporarily jump during the few hours the majority of working class folk have to do their shopping.

cygnus ,
@cygnus@lemmy.ca avatar

Slim profit margins my ass. Walmarts gross profit for the twelve months ending July 31, 2024 was $163.786B,

Not to sound flippant, but do you know what gross profit means? They aren’t pocketing all of that. Walmart’s net profit margin is 2.66%, which is minuscule. They make up for that by having enormous volume.

667 ,
@667@lemmy.radio avatar

A measly $3.2b. Can hardly afford a new yacht with that!

gila ,

That’s an expected tradeoff of operating an essential service is the point. It’s not as though their margin is that slim by mistake, or out of goodwill, or bad business sense. It’s meant to lead to the situation where we shop at Walmart not by choice, but in lieu of other options.

ChaoticNeutralCzech ,

Can’t wait for somebody to hack them, the displays are certainly neat. Especially if they manage to add it to an existing Home Automation network without extra hardware.

madis ,

youtu.be/JOIp4s4YNEs

downpunxx ,

I guess we'll have to take photos of every item we pick from the shelves, so if the register attempts to charge more, or somehow misses a sale, we will have to get our phones out and say hey this was the price when i picked it. Great. Fantastic. Precisely the sort of simplicity and ease to be expected of advanced technology.

YurkshireLad ,

Someone will have to start a website to track item prices so we can work out when the cheapest time to buy something is.

I’m store item prices will be the next gas prices.

downpunxx ,

and if they pull and rfid off your phone, or a bluetooth/wifi ping to of the apps you have running in the background like the walmart app, and are pricing per individual, it won't matter what time you go to shop, your price is gonna be your price whenever you show up

Midnitte ,

It’s not just Walmart - the entire grocery sector is doing it. The potential for abuse is certainly not low.

The new labels allow employees to change prices as often as every ten seconds. - NPR

AnarchoSnowPlow ,

It would be a crying shame if someone were to figure out a way to force those e ink displays to refresh fast enough that it kills the batteries on those things…

HubertManne ,

this gets into what if the price changes between pikcing it up and purchasing. They should really guarantee to not change prices while the store is open and find an hour to close and make 24hour stores 23 hours.

Midnitte ,

As noted in other comments, that certainly happens now even with paper tags - but it makes that wheel just a bit more greased…

It’s understandable given the effort required to update tags manually, but it would be nice to see price guarantees from stores (“price stable for 24 hours!”).

Tabzlock ,

Lots of stores do have the price guarantees, you just need to ask someone. For example we have 7 days but you need to ask an employee for a quote first. Also I might be willing to quote a single pencil but I don’t think everyone is, its normally big ticket items or a group of things.

Tabzlock ,

Paper tickets at work but change frequently. Had this happen a couple times. Since its manual we normally ask if someone updated the isle. I’ve had to respond a few times and had the ticket in my pocket still.

If there is major doubt though register price will be used, it’s not hard for someone to lie or move a ticket.

Oh also iirc there is a way to check price history to see if someone is lying so that can be used too if the store has that in the system.

Best thing for any store is to take a photo tbh since its not just eink.

I don’t really agree with this but its the way it is.

Kolanaki ,
@Kolanaki@yiffit.net avatar

If they used a screen for the price tag on the display: Cool.

If I have to look it up on my own device: Fuck that.

downpunxx ,

"oh here comes kolanaki, he buys a lot of wee wee pads for his wolfdog, we can tell because we just pinged his phone and smartwatch, let's up the price by 30%, our records for the last 5 years, indicate he's running out of wee wee pads right now, and our outside data collectors have told us he never buys them anywhere else, and should pay the premium"

PenguinTD ,

As long as they are still sending out flyers with stuff you buy you are okay. Also, if you already knew the price range of your regularly shopped goods, you know something is off. Superstore is already using digital tags. And you can just pull out your phone and take pictures.

Lastly, it should be put into law so you can’t increase price during the day. Going down is fine, but no going down and then going up again for peak hour. Stores can set whatever price they want to sell before opening. (for those non-regulated things)

Tabzlock ,

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.

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