$20 total cost per device
= $1.2m to outfit a store.
/$15 employee gross costs per hour
= 38 years of labour for one store....
Either the # SKUs would have to be lower, or the BOM smaller to justify this.
On the flipside consider the material cost of paper pricing tags, reduced risk of pricing error, ability to change pricing more rapidly, increased customer marketing/attraction.
I'd also imagine that removing this function from individual stores and centralising it would save a considerable amount of store management time.
Or maybe they are already doing that ... I said to call me paranoid.
I'm not a fan of it, but that will certainly recoup that cost much faster.
Only change the prices over night? (but unlike with employees you can reprice the entire store every night without any particular cost)
If this doesn't exist already, it will soon.
But customers are so used to confusing pricing labels you could just make the old (cheaper) price say: "Discount: $x".
Also if you hook up the change to motion detectors where you know no one is in the aisle, then you can skip it altogether.
The eventual outcome will possibly be a class action law suit and in a few years the customers can sign up to receive a gift card.
You can see similar behavior with the same company here: https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/loblaws-25-gift-card-class-...
That said, I know some people that work in the grocery industry, and my impression is that the margins are tight enough that they do the math on EVERYTHING