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Comment by jiveturkey | Hacker News Reader

Seen these at Ross and/or other discount stores. It boggled my mind. How could these possibly be cheaper than the staff swapping bits of paper. 10 year battery but I assume they break (and you have to walk around to find the broken ones) in 1-2 years, or get retail abuse, or other calamities.

The 4" ones (close to paper tag size) are $20.

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I wonder if the cost savings is in eliminating the labor required to physically relabel things. I presume sending one person on patrol to look for the broken tags twice a week is far cheaper.

I can't see how. You need the staff in the store anyway (to check stock level, neaten up things, return merch to the proper location, etc), so they are already interacting at every location. Otherwise they spend a lot of time relatively idle. Are you really going to get that extra bit of time out of them productively?

It's mostly for dynamic pricing (based on time of day, number of customers, weather, you name it). It'd be more expensive and time consuming to send an employee with a label printer all over the store a couple of times a day.

The HFT model is coming to retail? I don't like this.

What happens if I put an item in my cart when the tag says it costs three shillings, but when I get to the register they want five?

Only time I've seen this was an IKEA in Shanghai about 5 years ago. They had a sign that said that umbrellas cost (equivalent to) $1 if it was raining outside and $3 if it wasn't. :)

You wouldn't need a digital, dynamic tag for that?

The only time I've seen dynamic pricing was the KMart blue light special.

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