A supermarket trip may soon look different, thanks to electronic shelf labels

We're gonna need some new regulations that require all price labels to have a date/time of last change so we know when they changed the prices.

The first time the price of a good changes between the time I put it in my cart/basket and checkout, I will be starting a class-action lawsuit against corporate fraud.

Jesus, I can’t imagine just coming out and saying this like it’s not fucking deranged to charge people more for WATER during a heat wave.

and if there is a fire, we can raise prices of fire extinguishers, how cool is that?

I won’t say never, but my company has these and the tags aren’t able to be centrally updated meaning it would require manual intervention to reprice those items at all locations (and incorrect pricing is grounds for shutdown in some states) furthermore our software only does a pricebook load once a day so I can’t see that in our near future. I’m inclined to believe Walmart execs may be regurgitating a sales pitch more than what they’re capable of doing. That being said never say never and out techno dystopian future will be upon us soon.

Just leave my gallons of ice cream sitting there.

They'll probably require you to shop with your phone and scan shit as you go.

Yea, no, kiss my ass.

Also, the first time the price of something rises in the 5 minutes it takes for me to get my shopping done and get to the checkout, I’m taking a shit on the floor.

I'm with you I'm saving my dump truck load for the conveyor belt at the register.

It helps that it's an "industry analyst" and not someone from Walmart.

I can tell you, working in retail, there's no way they'd jack up prices during a heatwave for water. They still gotta compete with other stores, and charging more would cause shoppers to go to where it's cheaper.

Now if there's shortages all over town and even the followers can't keep up, I can see them fucking with prices. But they could do that right now if they wanted to. It's not hard to adjust prices.

The real advantage of electronic labels is not having a crew to replace stacks and stacks of labels all over the store. The cost of labor and cost of the actual label sheets and printer maintenance to keep all that up to date, I'm guessing, is getting to the point where it's cheaper to use electronics.

We've been seeing these electronic tags on sale items at Walmart for the past few years. It's been a few months since the last time we were in the store, but last weekend we noticed ALL items now had small two-color OLED price tags on them. I don't know if that means we're just lucky enough to be one of the first to get the new tech, or that the chain had already started rolling them out well before the article, but they're definitely out there. I'd actually love to get ahold of some just to play with them, although seeing the prices of OLEDs on ebay makes me wonder how any store is saving money by using them.