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How many of those have you seen in the real world? Maybe they're more popular elsewhere, but outside of warehouse store price labels I haven't seen the technol
by ethbro 7y ago
How many of those have you seen in the real world?
Maybe they're more popular elsewhere, but outside of warehouse store price labels I haven't seen the technology.
Certainly not in large format.
- jfim 7y agoA ton? Carrefour (I believe they're the second largest retailer, after Walmart) has had electronic shelf labels for well over a decade. I haven't seen them in the US, but they're not exactly uncommon in Europe and Asia.
- smacktoward 7y agoHere in the US, Kohl's (https://www.kohls.com/ https://www.kohls.com/) uses the e-ink price tags in their retail stores. They are a terrible application of the technology. They're not bright enough to be legible from a distance, and even up-close their legibility is not great. They just look washed-out and dingy. One of the main purposes of a price tag is to draw and hold the shopper's eye, and in that respect they fail miserably.
- avianlyric 7y ago> One of the main purposes of a price tag is to draw and hold the shopper's eye, and in that respect they fail miserably. There I was thinking the main purpose of a price tag is to tell you the price. Product packaging is meant to grab your eye. Price tags are mostly functional (although some shops also use them to advertise offers).
- nostrademons 7y agoThe buyer for price labels is the retailer. The retailer's purpose for a price tag is to grab your eye and get you to buy more. If the price tag dissuades you from buying the product, that is a net negative from the retailer's perspective, and they are the ones that make the purchasing decisions on price tags. Don't assume alignment of incentives. From the customer's perspective, the purpose of a price tag is to tell you the price. The customer isn't making the purchasing decisions for the price tags.
- pasquinelli 7y agoWhy would the price tag holding a shopper's attention have something to do with the likelihood of that shopper buying something?
- ethbro 7y agoIf a deal falls in the forest and no one see it, does the retailer make a sale?
- Normal_gaussian 7y agoToday I went to Tesco - a large supermarket in the UK - to buy 3 items required for dinner. I also planned to buy some chocolate of some sort. I bought the requirements, and passed by a the crisps (potato chips) aisle on my way to the chocolate. A glance half an aisle away told me that one of the three or four kinds of crisps my partner takes to work was on offer, I had half an aisles walking where I thought about it and ended up buying it. In the chocolate aisle I ended up buying a large bag of white chocolate that was particularly well priced (I could read every label from one place). As chocolate is a guilty luxury I've been known to leave without it if my deliberations last too long; being able to parse the information quickly led to a purchase. -- So that is why. Most shoppers are both immediately price driven and don't want to be there. This can be used to increase spends.
- avianlyric 7y agoInterestingly I know a little about why Tesco doesn’t use eInk price tags, having talked at length with one of the people that evaluated eInk tags for Tesco. Top reason was simply price and maintenance. Deploy this kind of tech to 3400 stores is seriously non-trivial (something I know, from having attempted to build and sell tech to Tesco), and even very low unit costs compound fast. Tesco top concerns with this type of tech are: 1. Price. Tesco is very capex sensitive. They generally only want to spend money on assets that have multiple uses. 2. Will it work 100% of time, or very close to it. Incorrect price tags are a serious issue for Tesco. 3. Who fixes it when it goes wrong and how? Again these don’t seem like hard issues, but 3400 physical store makes it hard. Especially when you can’t rely on store staff to deal with uncommon problems, they aren’t given the time or training, due to retails razor thin margins. One of the interesting non-obvious problem Tesco had with eInk price tags was simply making sure the right product tag appeared on the right shelf in the right place. This is despite has a very competent stock management system that tracks exactly what item lives on what shelf. With paper you just swap the tags and move on. With eInk displays you can’t do that because then physical location of a tag will no longer match it’s stored virtual location.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- bb88 7y agoI always thought Kohl's used LCD price tags.
- Cthulhu_ 7y agoI've seen those, they look more like old segmented LED displays. E-ink technology can be a lot clearer than that. Sounds to me like they wanted digital signs, but didn't want to pay for it. Can't blame them to be honest, they probably get damaged a lot and they're competing price-wise with small pieces of printed paper.
- gorgoiler 7y agoFunny: I have vision issues being able to focus on product packaging so when I am searching for a particular, say, cheese in the cheese section I find it much easier to scan/read the shelf labels than the products themselves. I find the uniformity much easier to cope with.
- arbitrage 7y agoI disagree. At my local Kohls, I can see the displays just fine from a reasonable distance. Up close their legibility is fine.
- grawprog 7y agoI've seen small lcd pricetags at superstore in Canada. But I've never seen e-ink price tags, or e-ink anything other than when I see people with e-readers.
- seized 7y agoReal Canadian Superstore has them, at least in BC.
- SahAssar 7y agoAre you sure you don't mean seven-segment displays or similar? I've seen many stores in Sweden use electronic displays, but they are usually LCD seven-segment or similar, not e-ink.
- mstade 7y agoAre you sure? Looking at the price tags page I could swear I've seen those in Sweden before, and this image looks like it may be from a Swedish (or at least Scandinavian) store: https://tw.eink.com/uploads/images/application/showcase/ESL4-2.jpg https://tw.eink.com/uploads/images/application/showcase/ESL4... I may very well be wrong, but I live a block away from a Coop, Systembolaget and a few other stores, I can do a quick sample test tomorrow. (I know they have tags similar looking to these but I couldn't swear they're e-ink. I always thought those tags were pretty cool but it drives me nuts when they aren't set and so you have to go around hunting for a price anyway. (Looking at you, Bauhaus!)
- ughapatent 7y agoPricer https://www.pricer.com/ https://www.pricer.com/ is the company that most retailers utilizing e-ink price tags are utilizing in Sweden (They were founded there) along with other retailers (Best Buy). Those tags utilize near Infrared communication to update.
- SahAssar 7y agoYeah, that's e-ink. I was basing off of my experiences in my town, perhaps we're just behind the curve :)
- tootie 7y agoI've done some shelf-edge signage projects recently and the market leaders are all LED or LCD.
- sitharus 7y agoOne of the major supermarket chains in New Zealand has rolled them out to many of their stores over the past decade or so. They look pretty good.
- vanous 7y agoStarted appearing in most supermarket chains in the Czech Republic. B/W and also dual colored.
- iagovar 7y agoI think I've seen this maybe a decade ago? I'm not sure. I'm talking about Spain though.
- ksec 7y agoEverywhere that values human productivity. Many Countries in Europe paying fair wages to those working in Supermarket has been using them for years if not decades.
- rtpg 7y agoI’ve seen them a lot in non-US countries. There is the reality that if this sign costs tens of dollars, you can go through the old printing process hundreds of firms before it becomes viable to use these kinds of screens though
- bobthepanda 7y agoHow much labor do you need for someone to manually replace a printed sign, though?
- thawaway1837 7y agoHow much additional labor is it to stick a new label the few times the price changes or the few times the location of items are changed, relative to programming those new prices and those new locations in a computer? And would that add up to needing to hire even a single new employee, considering that most retail stocking is done by regular employees during their down times (it’s not like stores are gonna reprice and rearrange products on the fly during busy times). And it’s not just the cost of a single eink sticker because they will get damaged or break down more frequently.
- mstade 7y agoAre these tags connected to a network? In that case I can definitely see the appeal for chain stores where you need consistent prices across stores in multiple cities. Set the price centrally, and have it come through everywhere without the need for any employees to go around setting new tags. Given all stores are chains these days (sadly) I can definitely imagine those savings add up to offset the cost of the tags. Especially over time and considering how massive some stores are.
- monocasa 7y agoYeah, they're normally hooked up to a low bandwidth network like an IR mesh or something. Another benefit of that is that it leaves the only regular stocking left which is the easiest part to automate. At that point you can cut out the grocery department entirely and leave the 10% weird cases to the front end staff.
- arghwhat 7y agoHere in DK, every price tag in every super- or hypermarket use them. A big hypermarket will have in excess of thousand in use, plus replacing lost/damaged ones. Even a small supermarket has hundreds. Electronic price tags are a huge business.
- Redoubts 7y agoSeeing them a lot in Best Buy.
- gambiting 7y agoPoland has those e-ink price tags everywhere, honestly majority of supermarkets now have them.
- cpeterso 7y agoMy local Whole Foods (in the SF Bay Area) uses E ink shelf labels in the produce section.
- mbreese 7y agoKroger has been experimenting with digital pricing in their shelf labels for over a year. Instead of eInk however, they were using LCDs, I think. In addition to just price tags, they can then also show animation and ads at strategic locations. It isn’t common yet, and I’ve only seen it at one of their test stores, but it’s pretty cool tech. But it is definitely not as set and forget as eInk.
- takeda 7y agoNeither of these, but California gives option to use them as registration plates. Don't think I will ever use them, because they also had to add GPS and ability to phone home in addition to having to pay monthly for using it.
- grogenaut 7y agoI've been to 7 best buy's in the last month and 6 had all price tags as eink
- fungi 7y agowe have eink bus timetables in sydney and the clearway/no parking signs that change for special events... pretty nifty. that said, you have a point, if tec was from china and/or was more open it would be everywhere.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- sschueller 7y agoIn Switzerland we see these all over the place. For example Coop supermarkets or Media Markt use them as price Tags. They also use the 3 color ones for marking sale items.
- dm3 7y agoOh wow... Been walking past these things for a few years now. Never realized it's E-Ink!
- woodpanel 7y agoIn Germany every eighth store uses them and that data set is from 2017: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XdbZE0WaS_k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XdbZE0WaS_k
- robin_reala 7y agoIrma in Denmark uses them, and they’re three-colour too (light-grey, black and red) which helps with offers, etc.
- burnte 7y agoKohl's uses the eink price tags, or at least used to a few years ago.
- hanspeter 7y agoThe e-ink price tags are used in most supermarkets in Denmark, and they started entering the shelves 10 years ago. But in large format I don't think I've ever seen one.