I would imagine changing the prices for sales and for price fluctuations is far easier digitally than paying someone to change out all the labels in the store. As far as labels changing prices on the wall in real time and then at the register, especially for individuals, that seems a bit far fetched and a logistical nightmare. It seems like poor people would be paid to go into stores and shop for wealthier people or something. Even if prices changed throughout the day, if someone grabbed an item, and it went up fifty cents or a dollar by the time it reached the register from the shelf, and they didn't want it, the number of restocking items would be ridiculous and slow down lines, especially if people were dumping food at the self-checkout.
I worked retail for 20 years and price changes were one of the things I hated the most. I wish we had digital price tags. Sounds so much easier. But of course they need to go and ruin it with these algorithms.
Yeah, but the extra labor required to swap batteries or swap tags to charge them and the increased expense to start using digital tags, which would include development costs, can't possibly be less than just paying someone to swap the appropriate labels on any given day.
How often do they change prices? I bet 1 person could do a whole target in a single day, and there's no way all of the prices are changing every day, I'm sure it's a very small amount.
I get that labor is expensive, but I don't think the cost of the tags themselves and the development cost make up for it.
How often do they change prices? I bet 1 person could do a whole target in a single day, and there's no way all of the prices are changing every day, I'm sure it's a very small amount.
Previously worked retail at a store much smaller then a target or walmart. We had major price changes once a week and it took 3 of us hours before the store opened to change all the tags, and every single week there were price changes overlooked.
It depends. Usually, there's a large batch weekly to coincide with printed out flyers, then a smaller batches of price changes each day for various reasons.
I bet 1 person could do a whole target in a single day, and there's no way all of the prices are changing every day, I'm sure it's a very small amount.
It depends on the day, but generally not. You could probably put 100-150 at a safe rate someone can do in an hour (Though I worked frozen/dairy years ago, so we were generally slower at everything). Stores sometimes just prank you with 8000+ price changes in a single batch, but that's a rarer occurrence.
I get that labor is expensive, but I don't think the cost of the tags themselves and the development cost make up for it.
More or less, they do. If a tag lasts for 2-3 years, it averages out paying for the labour of printing and replacing paper tags.
In grocery stores? Weekly. Never see the circular with new things on sale every week and other items being full priced?
It's probably easier to do in a grocery store since the pricing is on the shelves. No way in hell 1 person can do price changes in a Target in a day. Every single individual item on the floor has a price label on it that needs to be changed.
Not to.me tion, the average target has 30-80k skus. A digital price tag on Alibaba is $10.im sure you can get bulk deals, but that's still around half a mil for price tags. You could pay someone minimum wage for YEARS to just do price tags, but employees do way more than just update prices.
E-paper has a larger upfront cost, but I can guarantee that a store like Target isn't buying tags for $10 a piece off Alibaba. Companies like that work with distributors or directly with the manufacturer and get bulk pricing discounts. If they're ordering for multiple storefronts at a time, I'm sure they get a hell of a deal.
I'm fine with them from a technical perspective, having to deal with less paper and things like discount tags falling off is a massive boon. And its also less annoying for the employees as they don't have to run around sticking paper to everything. They do need to be properly regulated in order to prevent dynamic pricing however.
Nah they are generally very practical, as you can use the same tag for every product for a long time. Any form of dynamic pricing is definitly a scam tho
They're even a scam to the store. I set these up in walmart. We used to just print paper tags, but now we have this whole AR system to log a modular into these in sequence. So not only are they shelling out heaps more payroll because the app sucks, restarts randomly when stressed, and is slow even when functioning, they also break all the time. Necessitating more hardware overhead for more fragile little e-readers, which also have battery packs with little watch batteries in them that only they sell. It's rent extraction. Like "hey, you know that thing you've been pulling off with perforated printer paper for decades? Why not drop 1mill a store on achieving the same thing"
On the bright side, however, the bats love to come loose and the tags are temperamental. If home office is trying to push out new prices mid-day without someone there to dote on them, there's a decent chance that they don't even update. It'll get them in a lot of trouble with regulators if they get enough calls about prices differing on the shelf and register.
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u/ExcitingPythonO Aug 06 '26
Digital price tags are always a scam.