7 ms·

A 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

by jfim 7y ago

A 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 ago
Here 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 ago
    The 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 ago
      Why would the price tag holding a shopper's attention have something to do with the likelihood of that shopper buying something?
      - ethbro 7y ago
        If a deal falls in the forest and no one see it, does the retailer make a sale?
      - Normal_gaussian 7y ago
        Today 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 ago
        Interestingly 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.
    - jfim 7y ago
      Depending on the jurisdiction, price tags also have to be correct as well. In certain areas, the consumer laws are such that the lowest of the register price and the displayed price must be used, and in other even friendlier jurisdictions, a discount of $10 has to be applied to the shelf price if the shelf price is lower than the register price (including giving away the item for free if the item is worth less than $10). In those jurisdictions, ensuring that the price is correctly synchronized between displays and the registers is significantly more important than in jurisdictions with weaker consumer laws.
      - martyvis 7y ago
        I'm not convinced that the synchronisation is assured. While paper labels maybe subject to lack of staff or process discipline, electronic labels are going to suffer from power/battery issues, connection issues to the database, physical product ending up on the wrong shelf, etc. It'd be interesting to see independent reports on error rates between the two methods. ( Our biggest issue is double-scanning of product at the cash register.)
      - Agnosco 7y ago
        Where I'm from, many items have to have an easily comparable and visible price per kg (or e.g. l). Works so well (for the consumer) when you are looking at a selection of a specific product category. Handling all this data and keeping it up to date is much easier with digitised and synchronised displays.
    - anigbrowl 7y ago
      I don't want to be advertised to when I'm already in your damn store, I just want price information. If you try to manipulate me I am definitely less likely to buy your product. Retailers that don't care about their customers deserve to lose money.
      - pintxo 7y ago
        Might be difficult to find a retailer NOT trying to manipulate you.
        anigbrowl 7y ago
        And yet there are differences of degree and I definitely prefer to spend my $ at retailers that do less of it.
    - bloak 7y ago
      > The retailer's purpose for a price tag is to grab your eye and get you to buy more. I'm not sure that's really true. What a supermarket like Tesco wants to do is sell stuff at a high price to people who don't care about the price (there are a lot of such people) while having stuff available at a low price to people who will only buy it if the price is competitive (there are also a lot of those people). One way to do that is to put the expensive stuff at eye level and the cheaper stuff on the bottom shelf. Another way to do it is to have periodic offers: some people will buy certain products only when they're on offer. Yet another way to do it is to make the prices hard to read or hard to compare. And the shops do that, in my experience. E Ink could be another tool for that. "Almost illegible from a distance of more than 40 cm" could be a selling point.
    - pmontra 7y ago
      I don't know about the USA but where I live (Italy) a price tag is subject to some requirements by law. For example it shows the cost by kg or by liter to be able to compare products (of course not on, let's say, shavers.) Packaging can be as catchy as the manufacturer wishes but price tags are very standard and uniform within a store. The store can add label with discounts etc but not on the price tag.
      - eb0la 7y ago
        Price per/{kg,l,unit} is mandated by EU regulations. Very useful to see if a 2nd unit -75% off offer is really a good price or not.
    - Al-Khwarizmi 7y ago
      I guess this depends a lot on country and culture. In Spain, in the supermarkets I usually go to, price tags are standard, black-and-white and uniform, just telling you the price and other standardized information (like price per kg). To grab your eye towards certain products, supermarkets add additional signs near the price tags (but not instead of them). This is a typical example: https://cflvdg.avoz.es/sc/X71nZnU3spbY_97PpRRHtVnNB20=/x/2018/03/22/00121521756301699155341/Foto/CM23C11F9_23328.jpg https://cflvdg.avoz.es/sc/X71nZnU3spbY_97PpRRHtVnNB20=/x/201... - the price tags are standard, but the yellow sign with the eye ("you have a keen eye!") draws your attention to a particular tag. If they want to draw your attention even more they will use a larger sign, no problem. By the way, eInk price tags in supermarkets here are common. Far from ubiquitous, but common.
    - dublin 7y ago
      The advantage for the retailer is that pricing is now "soft" and can be changed as often as desired for any of a number of reasons, including sales, promotions, A/B pricing tests, etc.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- bb88 7y ago
  I always thought Kohl's used LCD price tags.
  - LanceH 7y ago
    The Kohl's near me has used eink for years. They are easy enough to read when next to the item. For drawing your attention, they use hard copy signs.
  - evan_ 7y ago
    I think you’re right, they flicker when you look at them sidelong.
- Cthulhu_ 7y ago
  I'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 ago
  Funny: 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 ago
  I disagree. At my local Kohls, I can see the displays just fine from a reasonable distance. Up close their legibility is fine.
grawprog 7y ago
I'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 ago
  Real Canadian Superstore has them, at least in BC.
SahAssar 7y ago
Are 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 ago
  Are 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 ago
    Pricer 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 ago
    Yeah, that's e-ink. I was basing off of my experiences in my town, perhaps we're just behind the curve :)
tootie 7y ago
I've done some shelf-edge signage projects recently and the market leaders are all LED or LCD.
sitharus 7y ago
One 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.

by jfim 7y ago

smacktoward 7y ago

Here 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 ago
  The 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 ago
    Why would the price tag holding a shopper's attention have something to do with the likelihood of that shopper buying something?
    - ethbro 7y ago
      If a deal falls in the forest and no one see it, does the retailer make a sale?
    - Normal_gaussian 7y ago
      Today 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 ago
        Interestingly 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.
  - jfim 7y ago
    Depending on the jurisdiction, price tags also have to be correct as well. In certain areas, the consumer laws are such that the lowest of the register price and the displayed price must be used, and in other even friendlier jurisdictions, a discount of $10 has to be applied to the shelf price if the shelf price is lower than the register price (including giving away the item for free if the item is worth less than $10). In those jurisdictions, ensuring that the price is correctly synchronized between displays and the registers is significantly more important than in jurisdictions with weaker consumer laws.
    - martyvis 7y ago
      I'm not convinced that the synchronisation is assured. While paper labels maybe subject to lack of staff or process discipline, electronic labels are going to suffer from power/battery issues, connection issues to the database, physical product ending up on the wrong shelf, etc. It'd be interesting to see independent reports on error rates between the two methods. ( Our biggest issue is double-scanning of product at the cash register.)
    - Agnosco 7y ago
      Where I'm from, many items have to have an easily comparable and visible price per kg (or e.g. l). Works so well (for the consumer) when you are looking at a selection of a specific product category. Handling all this data and keeping it up to date is much easier with digitised and synchronised displays.
  - anigbrowl 7y ago
    I don't want to be advertised to when I'm already in your damn store, I just want price information. If you try to manipulate me I am definitely less likely to buy your product. Retailers that don't care about their customers deserve to lose money.
    - pintxo 7y ago
      Might be difficult to find a retailer NOT trying to manipulate you.
      - anigbrowl 7y ago
        And yet there are differences of degree and I definitely prefer to spend my $ at retailers that do less of it.
  - bloak 7y ago
    > The retailer's purpose for a price tag is to grab your eye and get you to buy more. I'm not sure that's really true. What a supermarket like Tesco wants to do is sell stuff at a high price to people who don't care about the price (there are a lot of such people) while having stuff available at a low price to people who will only buy it if the price is competitive (there are also a lot of those people). One way to do that is to put the expensive stuff at eye level and the cheaper stuff on the bottom shelf. Another way to do it is to have periodic offers: some people will buy certain products only when they're on offer. Yet another way to do it is to make the prices hard to read or hard to compare. And the shops do that, in my experience. E Ink could be another tool for that. "Almost illegible from a distance of more than 40 cm" could be a selling point.
  - pmontra 7y ago
    I don't know about the USA but where I live (Italy) a price tag is subject to some requirements by law. For example it shows the cost by kg or by liter to be able to compare products (of course not on, let's say, shavers.) Packaging can be as catchy as the manufacturer wishes but price tags are very standard and uniform within a store. The store can add label with discounts etc but not on the price tag.
    - eb0la 7y ago
      Price per/{kg,l,unit} is mandated by EU regulations. Very useful to see if a 2nd unit -75% off offer is really a good price or not.
  - Al-Khwarizmi 7y ago
    I guess this depends a lot on country and culture. In Spain, in the supermarkets I usually go to, price tags are standard, black-and-white and uniform, just telling you the price and other standardized information (like price per kg). To grab your eye towards certain products, supermarkets add additional signs near the price tags (but not instead of them). This is a typical example: https://cflvdg.avoz.es/sc/X71nZnU3spbY_97PpRRHtVnNB20=/x/2018/03/22/00121521756301699155341/Foto/CM23C11F9_23328.jpg https://cflvdg.avoz.es/sc/X71nZnU3spbY_97PpRRHtVnNB20=/x/201... - the price tags are standard, but the yellow sign with the eye ("you have a keen eye!") draws your attention to a particular tag. If they want to draw your attention even more they will use a larger sign, no problem. By the way, eInk price tags in supermarkets here are common. Far from ubiquitous, but common.
  - dublin 7y ago
    The advantage for the retailer is that pricing is now "soft" and can be changed as often as desired for any of a number of reasons, including sales, promotions, A/B pricing tests, etc.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
bb88 7y ago
I always thought Kohl's used LCD price tags.
- LanceH 7y ago
  The Kohl's near me has used eink for years. They are easy enough to read when next to the item. For drawing your attention, they use hard copy signs.
- evan_ 7y ago
  I think you’re right, they flicker when you look at them sidelong.
Cthulhu_ 7y ago
I'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 ago
Funny: 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 ago
I disagree. At my local Kohls, I can see the displays just fine from a reasonable distance. Up close their legibility is fine.

grawprog 7y ago

I'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 ago
Real Canadian Superstore has them, at least in BC.

SahAssar 7y ago

Are 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 ago
Are 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 ago
  Pricer 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 ago
  Yeah, that's e-ink. I was basing off of my experiences in my town, perhaps we're just behind the curve :)

tootie 7y ago

I've done some shelf-edge signage projects recently and the market leaders are all LED or LCD.

sitharus 7y ago

One 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.