Digital price tags can change the cost of groceries 6 times per minute –

3 comments

1. This is ridiculous. People should know the cost of what they’re buying when they check out. Hopefully rules are in place to only allow price changing at opening or closing. Some shoppers are on a strict budget and shouldn’t have to put back groceries at check out.

2. I would expect stores to mostly do it via overnight changes or similar. It doesn’t make sense to change prices much more frequently than that, but the speed at which they can change probably feeds back to how long it takes to manage the overall store.

   The article gives an example of Walmart – currently it takes them 2 days of human labor to update pricing in a store.

   Marketing points for technology tend to be the tech company calling out things that they’re proud of almost as often as things they expect their customers to use. The fast update rate is kinda impressive for people who might be thinking about other uses which makes that point more about attracting someone with a different use case. For instance, lots of e-ink style displays currently have recommendations like “don’t update the display more than once every 60 seconds” or even less often. These are really common in ultra low power information displays, so if they have tech that can do every 10 seconds and still be within the power window that people are looking for, that might be a big win for other uses.

3. Late stage capitalism