signs: https://eink.com/signage.html
price tags: https://eink.com/electronic-shelf-label.html
more: https://eink.com/application.html
Are you sure you know EInk/PVI's business better than they do?
price tags: https://eink.com/electronic-shelf-label.html
more: https://eink.com/application.html
Are you sure you know EInk/PVI's business better than they do?
Maybe they're more popular elsewhere, but outside of warehouse store price labels I haven't seen the technology.
Certainly not in large format.
I haven't seen them in the US, but they're not exactly uncommon in Europe and Asia.
One of the main purposes of a price tag is to draw and hold the shopper's eye, and in that respect they fail miserably.
There I was thinking the main purpose of a price tag is to tell you the price.
Product packaging is meant to grab your eye. Price tags are mostly functional (although some shops also use them to advertise offers).
Don't assume alignment of incentives. From the customer's perspective, the purpose of a price tag is to tell you the price. The customer isn't making the purchasing decisions for the price tags.
I bought the requirements, and passed by a the crisps (potato chips) aisle on my way to the chocolate. A glance half an aisle away told me that one of the three or four kinds of crisps my partner takes to work was on offer, I had half an aisles walking where I thought about it and ended up buying it.
In the chocolate aisle I ended up buying a large bag of white chocolate that was particularly well priced (I could read every label from one place). As chocolate is a guilty luxury I've been known to leave without it if my deliberations last too long; being able to parse the information quickly led to a purchase.
--
So that is why. Most shoppers are both immediately price driven and don't want to be there. This can be used to increase spends.
Top reason was simply price and maintenance. Deploy this kind of tech to 3400 stores is seriously non-trivial (something I know, from having attempted to build and sell tech to Tesco), and even very low unit costs compound fast.
Tesco top concerns with this type of tech are:
1. Price. Tesco is very capex sensitive. They generally only want to spend money on assets that have multiple uses.
2. Will it work 100% of time, or very close to it. Incorrect price tags are a serious issue for Tesco.
3. Who fixes it when it goes wrong and how?
Again these don’t seem like hard issues, but 3400 physical store makes it hard. Especially when you can’t rely on store staff to deal with uncommon problems, they aren’t given the time or training, due to retails razor thin margins.
One of the interesting non-obvious problem Tesco had with eInk price tags was simply making sure the right product tag appeared on the right shelf in the right place. This is despite has a very competent stock management system that tracks exactly what item lives on what shelf.
With paper you just swap the tags and move on. With eInk displays you can’t do that because then physical location of a tag will no longer match it’s stored virtual location.
Same for the e-ink price tags, I've spotted them in two different supermarkets of the same chain so far but I'm 100% sure that in ~2 years literally all of them will have them.
At least not to the extent expected.
The closest explanation I can think of is that so much of store operations' focus is on standardization (which itself is a tough problem), that deliberately disturbing standardization seems anathema.
That said, it's definitely changing in some chains. But you'll still get tons of blank looks or red tape in most, if you want to run an experiment like that.
I am a field tech for retail stores and see new technology being piloted all the time.
Rollouts are how they survive. Every tech refresh cycle is an enormous project handled by roaming teams who travel. I have done a 9-month rollout project for a huge chain. It was a great year. :)
They advertise their % off original retail to increase volumes of sales.
Price is their theoretical business, if the products were enticing enough themselves they'd not have made it to Kohls.
In certain areas, the consumer laws are such that the lowest of the register price and the displayed price must be used, and in other even friendlier jurisdictions, a discount of $10 has to be applied to the shelf price if the shelf price is lower than the register price (including giving away the item for free if the item is worth less than $10).
In those jurisdictions, ensuring that the price is correctly synchronized between displays and the registers is significantly more important than in jurisdictions with weaker consumer laws.
Handling all this data and keeping it up to date is much easier with digitised and synchronised displays.
I'm not sure that's really true.
What a supermarket like Tesco wants to do is sell stuff at a high price to people who don't care about the price (there are a lot of such people) while having stuff available at a low price to people who will only buy it if the price is competitive (there are also a lot of those people). One way to do that is to put the expensive stuff at eye level and the cheaper stuff on the bottom shelf. Another way to do it is to have periodic offers: some people will buy certain products only when they're on offer. Yet another way to do it is to make the prices hard to read or hard to compare. And the shops do that, in my experience. E Ink could be another tool for that. "Almost illegible from a distance of more than 40 cm" could be a selling point.
This is a typical example: https://cflvdg.avoz.es/sc/X71nZnU3spbY_97PpRRHtVnNB20=/x/201... - the price tags are standard, but the yellow sign with the eye ("you have a keen eye!") draws your attention to a particular tag. If they want to draw your attention even more they will use a larger sign, no problem.
By the way, eInk price tags in supermarkets here are common. Far from ubiquitous, but common.
Can't blame them to be honest, they probably get damaged a lot and they're competing price-wise with small pieces of printed paper.
I may very well be wrong, but I live a block away from a Coop, Systembolaget and a few other stores, I can do a quick sample test tomorrow. (I know they have tags similar looking to these but I couldn't swear they're e-ink. I always thought those tags were pretty cool but it drives me nuts when they aren't set and so you have to go around hunting for a price anyway. (Looking at you, Bauhaus!)
There is the reality that if this sign costs tens of dollars, you can go through the old printing process hundreds of firms before it becomes viable to use these kinds of screens though
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.
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.
Ah, but with networked electronic tags, they totally could try and maximize revenue even more by dynamically repricing products throughout the day.
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).
The real holy grail in price segmentation would be something like Google glasses that show individualized prices for each product. Then the store could do all kinds of targeted price promotion based on my buying history. Or even do promotional pricing based on my shopping trip for that day. Maybe it notices I'm about to checkout and I have hamburgers in my cart, it could offer me a promotional price on buns. Or lower the price of sale items as I walk past them without picking them up to try to find the highest pricepoint I'm willing to pay.
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.
Electronic price tags are a huge business.
In addition to just price tags, they can then also show animation and ads at strategic locations.
It isn’t common yet, and I’ve only seen it at one of their test stores, but it’s pretty cool tech. But it is definitely not as set and forget as eInk.
that said, you have a point, if tec was from china and/or was more open it would be everywhere.
But in large format I don't think I've ever seen one.
Never said that I do, and, yes they are NOW finally starting to pursue the signage / label markets. My point was that they could and should have done so 10 or more years ago.
I actually think there's a lot of room at the low end of the market to sell an on-premises ARM- or NUC-based server which interfaces with the tags over a radio link and provides aggregate data back to a cloud-based system for control and pricing updates. That would get you the millions of convenience stores who have to pay 3rd-party contractors to do their shelf labels. This would be especially brilliant if you combined a software fee with equipment leases so that your solution is an operating expense instead of an upfront capital cost.
Your statement implies this is a recent development but many large retailers, like Best Buy and Kohls, have had these for well over 5 years, maybe even 10 I just don't remember precisely.
I dunno, makes sense to me that you'd first address something where color and large sizes isn't very important, start making some revenue, do R&D on manufacturing larger formats and color and frame rate, and gradually introduce new products as they can be developed.
It's not like they've been keeping other color e-ink devices off the market with patents -- they didn't exist until today AFAIK. Other things billed as "color e-ink" substitutes that I've seen consume power in standby (and I keep checking from time to time with fingers crossed). I remember hearing stories about how much trouble they had getting from prototype (circa 1996) which I saw in lab to a model ready for production in 2007. 10+ years of process development to get to where it was in the first kindle.
And to be honest I'm not sure another company could just pick up the technology and start producing them in bigger quantities, these things are barely related to other displays at all and I imagine the production lines are super different. Plus patents from 1997 are expired now anyway, so if someone else could do it they are allowed to.
Knowing a fair bit about how their displays work, it's one of the few cases in electronic hardware I can think of that really seems to deserve a patent given how much creativity and time it took to start manufacturing, and how much money they had to spend to get it to the stage where it worked reliably at all. We could very easily be in a world where these displays didn't exist at all, plus or minus a few people making different choices about how to spend their money and time.
While LCDs still consume power just to display a picture, it can go very low : see how watches can run for a decade on a single tiny battery ! (I'm not even sure that e-ink would necessarily be an improvement there, considering that you'll want a watch to refresh a part of the screen at least once a minute...)