How much labor do you need for someone to manually replace a printed sign, 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.