Price Tag Trick

The retail stores around here are finally getting around to replacing paper shelf tags for prices with nifty e-ink displays. New this time around, some are now color e-ink and make it more obvious when there’s special pricing in play.

I was in Walmart the other day where they just put in the new tags and see theirs have an additional trick. When a store employee is shopping for an online order, they head to the general area for the next item, click a button on their shopping device and the tag for item flashes a blue LED to help the picker get the right item.

Nice! I could see that saving a lot of time where there’s 20 very similar items you’d need to carefully dig through to find the specific customer requested item.

I’d hope that having the ability to easily update pricing electronically would make pricing more accurate, but sadly not so much. Our everyday grocery store, Safeway, has the electronic tags and there’s still a fair amount nagging at checkout to get the price on the shelf. Sigh.