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Comment by kristofferR | Hacker News Reader

Judging from the pictures they'll still use paper price labels.

Why? It seems extremely arcane to still use paper price labels in 2017, especially for stores as big and centrally run as Walmart.

With digital price labels you can update prices centrally across the whole country within seconds, and it costs basically nothing to implement too, when the labor cost of manually updating paper price labels are factored in.

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Imagine if you got your wish (actually, at Kohls it is like this, last time I was there).

Now imagine thru some method, they could tell which shopper was nearby shelves, looking - and who they were. Do a instant credit check lookup (perhaps with something special with the credit bureaus that don't put a ding on the report), to find out what that nearby shopper is "worth".

Then instantly change the prices in that one area of the store - perhaps to gain just a few more pennies from a wealthy customer, or maybe (perhaps) to try to steer a customer to a particular brand who has paid the store for this purpose (by changing the prices of other brands to be higher, so that the buyer might go for the lower priced item if they are on a lower economic rung - or vice-versa to get them to buy a higher-cost item for perceived "luxury").

This would be easily possible with today's technology. It wouldn't be cheap to implement, and likely the back-end systems are so f-d up that it would take a revamp or a lot of work to get everything talking together properly, plus the attendant tech to recognize shoppers (cell phone IMEI? facial rec? something)...

...but I am certain that if the profit motive was there, and it offset those costs, it would be done. And Walmart would likely do it, too.

The offline world would then be on par with the online world when it comes to targeted pricing.

you can get around most of that using private browsing. but there's no "private browsing mode" in real life.

Isn't it called "burqua browsing mode"? More seriously, of course it's harder in the offline world, I agree.

It is; regular people in the western world - especially men - aren't generally welcome in a shop when they're wearing face-covering masks, for security reasons.

Yeah it's not like Amazon doesn't have behavioral-influenced dynamic pricing. It seems we've passively accepted it.

> and it costs basically nothing to implement too.

I find that hard to believe, given the scale of Walmart's operations - they have close to 5000 stores, and who knows how much technical debt they have in their stocking/inventory systems.

I clarified that I meant with labor taken into account.

I don't understand the technical debt argument though - if a robot can scan prices to check that they are correct, a display should be able to display the price without any issue. The prices are obviously accedible in a database.

Considering the fact that Walmart's last FY earnings were something to the tune of $124.62B,[1] regardless of technical debt or other factors I don't think spending less than 1% of that to do a (probably) much needed upgrade is a hard sell to anyone rational.

[1]: https://amigobulls.com/stocks/WMT/income-statement/annual

Gross profit is not net profit.

You're right, my bad-I updated the comment. Still, even with their net income being $13.64B for the year, it doesn't seem like much of an issue, especially if rolled out over a multi-year period.

Shelves need to be checked, faced and re-stocked on a daily basis. Someone is already checking every shelf in the store every day, so the actual labour cost of changing paper price labels is remarkably small.

Electronic shelf labels could facilitate dynamic price changes, but this is likely to be highly unpopular with customers. The mere presence of ESLs could imply volatile or manipulative pricing and undermine customer trust.

> The mere presence of ESLs could imply volatile or manipulative pricing and undermine customer trust.

It definitely does that for me. The heuristic I use in life is very simple - if it can be done and makes economic sense, it will be done. Volatile pricing can be done with electronic signs, and it definitely could seem to make economic sense to some companies.

I'm actually extremely surprised that volatile prices aren't already common in the US. The grocery chains here in Norway update prices across the country as soon as they notice that competitors sell the same products cheaper (provided they want to be the cheapest for that product), often several times a day. ESLs have been very common in big stores since perhaps 2013.

Our BestBuy alternative Power actually had a big ad campaign last year about how their digital signs and their price robot allows them to offer lower prices than what their competitors offer.

>it costs basically nothing to implement too,

Eh. Don't be so sure of this.

Yes, this technology exists. No, it's typically not feasible to implement. The ROI simply doesn't make sense.

Each store houses about 250,000 unique products. That means you'll need that many digital price tags. If they're $4 a peice (highly unlikely), thats 1M per store - and that's only in the new hardware.

You also need to test different environments - will it work in freezers, coolers, and under heated lamps (150F temperatures)? Do those places have wifi access?

Then you need to test and update the wireless infrastructure. Adding 250k devices to a network is not a small task.

Then update whatever software exists to send out price updates. This is honestly the cheapest part, all things considered. And it can be applied to the whole chain / store by store, depends on the roll out strategy.

All in all, it's at least 1 million per store. A brand new store costs the same amount. So you'd also be paying for the opportunity cost of not opening a new store. So you'd also lose out on the potential revenue of that new store.

There's other factors to consider, but the math never shakes out positively. There are bigger fish to fry than price tags.

> Each store houses about 250,000 unique products.

https://corporate.walmart.com/_news_/news-archive/2005/01/07...

"Supercenters average 187,000 square feet, employ 350 or more associates on average and offer 142,000 different items."

> If they're $4 a peice (highly unlikely)

looks like they're maybe $10 per on alibaba, in lowish volumes.

> You also need to test different environments - will it work in freezers, coolers, and under heated lamps (150F temperatures)?

they can just go check out any of the many places that already use such tags, and note that they work fine.

> Do those places have wifi access?

> Adding 250k devices to a network is not a small task.

they use 433MHz ISM, and don't screw around with IP networking. here's an example device on alibaba

https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/Wireless-digital-pric...

> There's other factors to consider, but the math never shakes out positively. There are bigger fish to fry than price tags.

they're used in hazel's in boulder, co. pretty sure i've seen them used in some other stores, though names aren't coming to mind at the moment.

Would you be so kind as to source some of your numbers? Here it says that a store has 120,000-142,000 products: https://corporate.walmart.com/_news_/news-archive/2005/01/07...

And doing the math here, it appears to be circa $3m in just capex per new store: https://corporate.walmart.com/_news_/news-archive/2014/02/20...

I'm also suspicious of your claim of opportunity cost. Walmart has circa 6k stores and has annual profits in the $15 billion range, and the ability to tap the capital markets as needed. They appear to be able to afford both new stores and price tags.

It would be a huge waste of money because I think the need for electronic price tags will be obsolete in around 5 years max.

I think soon a lot of supermarkets will do same day delivery so you order your food during the day and it gets delivered to you at home the same evening. Or they may implement a system where you order online and you've given a collection time.

Either way going into a supermarket and browsing up and down the isles will become less and less popular so it wouldn't make sense for supermarkets to invest in electronic price tags. I don't know for sure but that's how I see it going.

I suppose because modernising existing systems is tedious, error-prone and expensive. The latter two in principle apply to implementing new systems as well but at least those are exciting and, well, new.

You'd be hard-pressed to find a single company that relies solely on digital processes. In terms of digitalisation everyone seems to be talking about AI, AR, robotics and technologies like Blockchain. However, while certainly interesting those aren't the main avenues for bringing about digital transformation.

Replacing paper-based processes and doing away with the need for physical presence to conduct business are.

So, Walmart will soon have robots running up and down their aisles while at the same time we still largely rely on paper for invoicing and accounting.

We'll soon have self-driving cars for all our wonderful commuting but we still haven't figured out how to use technology for remote working to make travelling to a ridiculously expensive place called 'office' a thing of the past.

Probably because it's the lowest common denominator across all states to follow codes.

https://www.nist.gov/pml/weights-and-measures/us-retail-pric...

A company the size of Walmart would need to employ many lawyers just to deal with state to state pricing laws.

Paper doesn't break. The price on paper doesn't suddenly disappear because the internet is down or someone's program glitched, which is especially important for unit priced items which have strict laws about accuracy in pricing. You don't need to bug the home office everytime you need to change a price locally or they make an error in pricing because someone transposed a zip code number.

I mean...we have something like this already with climate control and thermostats in offices and stores. The central control can screw up spectacularly at times,

At the very least you will need another little robot or human that goes by and verifies that the prices have actually been updated. I can't imagine the LCD price displayers will be super high reliable and built to last decades.

You seem to think that electronic price labels is a new unproven technology, while it is actually extremely common and well tested. After the initial introduction period, where errors can occur, it's pretty much guaranteed to work as flawless as it does everywhere else.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_shelf_label

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