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ArkanExplorer

Typical supermarket with 60,000 SKUS;

$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.

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You're also forgetting the ability for stores to execute "surge" pricing.

I'm not a fan of it, but that will certainly recoup that cost much faster.

How do you handle the case where a shopper picked up an item at a certain price but by the time they got to the cash register it had changed?

Charge the lower price at the register for 2 hours after changing the display price?

Only change the prices over night? (but unlike with employees you can reprice the entire store every night without any particular cost)

easy, you just display both prices with a fat title 'Hurry up! Price will be 25% higher in 12 minutes"

If this doesn't exist already, it will soon.

This seems like a bad idea. If I own a physical store and you’re in it I don’t want to encourage you to leave quickly. I want you in there as long as possible putting things in your cart.

wouldn't this encourage people to buy fewer items?

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.

Could maybe be solved by adding some more technology (e.g. a barcode) that allows them to reserve the item at the current price, plus maybe some other kind of incentive.

The customer probably won't notice and if they do they'll walk back to the place they found the item and find the e-ink price tag has a price that matches the till. If they some how dispute it further the business will just lie like a rug until a particularly pernicious customer takes pictures of the price tag and then argues with the manager.

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-...

Call me paranoid/cynical but maybe they are planning on a future system were they use the profile they have on you to calculate your preferences and buying power and update the signs on the fly when you're coming up to them.

Or maybe they are already doing that ... I said to call me paranoid.

Some online services are already engaging in price discrimination, though physical retail has greater limitations in communicating prices to individual customers. I think that removing price tags entirely would be necessary for full price discrimination in brick and mortar retail (or some similarly revolutionary step, like AR vision placing price tags on items). That's not to say it's infeasible, but other changes may be necessary first. For example, in an Amazon Go location, you don't need to check out the items at the end. Customers would still definitely want to know prices of items, but I could imagine them caring less about seeing price tags if they aren't checking out immediately after. I think another system that could help would be a partial or full subscription model, where the subscription price could be an opportunity for price discrimination.

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