Bring on the Digital Shelf Labels!

A musing on pricing labels in grocery stores, and some store theory, too.

As before and so again, I'm Jayel, a non-binary housed in a Florida men's prison.

I was reading the news one day, where people posited a worry about Digital Shelf Labels in grocery stores.
In my past, I've worked for two grocery stores here in America, as both a Cashier, and as a Customer Service Center Representative. In the former role, I rang up your canned pears, butternut squash, and internally cringed at your package of shrimp. In the latter role, I'm the person you'd kvetch to over the canned pears ringing up at $1.29 when the shelf tag reads 79¢, the cashier ringing up an acorn squash when it's clearly a butternut, etc.

So let's talk about shelf tags!

In my CSC role, I would go out to check the shelf tag when you, the customer, would tell me that the tag says one thing while the register rings up another. Sometimes, the customer follows me; other times, I go on my own. Whether or not you are there, I have your item in my hand as I beeline for the aisle and item to compare the tag and item together, and search for nearby similar items.

We usually have the same brand of item with two or three sizes sitting next to, above or below each other -- maybe there's a 12 oz. and an 18 oz. can of pears side by side as example. If you've grabbed the 18 oz. can, which is $1.29 according to the tag, and its neighboring 12 oz. can is 79¢, I can offer you the correct sized can for the expected price unless I can find us in error (such as a stocker filled the 12 oz. slot with 18 oz. cans, which does happen).

One of the other things that can happen is we miss pulling a tag after a sale has ended. So maybe the 18 oz. can from above has a sale tag, marking it to 79¢, but the sale ended yesterday. Because our tags team missed it during their sweep, you were entitled (at least back when I worked there) to receive the deal we left posted. We find ourselves in error, you benefit; at that moment, I'm obligated to call our scanning coordinator, notify them that UPC 70123456776 has a bad tag, shows the sale price, I pulled the tag and need a new one.
They now have to go print a new tag and hustle out to the shelves to put that in place. Bad tags can cost stores (which historically have operated on slim margins) lots of money when shoppers are diligent about verifying what they are paying (hint, hint). We are in an era of more informed shoppers, so make of that what you will.

A Digital Shelf Label changes this practice of tag replacement. It goes from...

Tuesday night, as the store closes and the tagging team pores over their lists to pull paper tags and replace them while drinking a can of wiiings, it's clearly possible for a tag or 19 to be missed in an ocean of a store. New prices are rolled out to the cash registers by the scanning coordinator while the team scurry through the store, popping tags.
The team goes home an hour before the store reopens, exhausted and blurry-eyed.

To...

Tuesday night, 23:59:59, an automated system clears all of the expired sale tags digitally, rolls out new sale tags, and pushes the price updates for the registers with what approaches alarming accuracy. Someone (or several someones, ideally) visually inspects the automation's output, ensures that the stocker didn't put the pears in the wrong spot, signs off that the transformation is complete from a handheld computer and goes home to sleep. It can take fewer people to do this, so some people are reassigned to dayshift and guest servicing, meaning more people are available to make sure your old aunt Ethel can find the dried prunes on aisle 5, and that your visually impaired neighbor Arturo has a personal shopper available, willing, and able to help him navigate the store to make his delicious lentil soup.

Oh, wait, stores offer help like that?

I know my stores did! We would assign a clerk to walk with a person who needed help getting things. All they needed to do was come to the service center desk at the front of the store and ask for a little help with their shopping. We'd hop on the intercom and call for a clerk who was designated as a helper by name.

So the digital tags make that possible?

The digital tags can make that more possible by proxy. By needing fewer people to scour for little slips of paper at night, stores can not only have more people available for hands-on assistance during shopping hours, but also better manage how much money or product they can be pushed into giving away due to preventable errors.

But I want that oversized can from the mistake earlier.

No, you don't. :)
Sure, you saved 50¢ a can that day, but the store needs to make up that shortfall somewhere. The easiest way is to ease the price of several somethings up by a bit for a few weeks for people who do not have the store's rewards card.
Maybe ground beef goes up by 5¢ a pound, or the store brand bread goes to $1.29 from $1.19 a loaf, but if you have our shopper card, you'll get these at the old price (and we get to use and sell your data to market to you specifically).
In short, someone ultimately pays for the error and its correction, be it the shopper who refuses to use the store's shopper card paying higher prices, or the ones whose personal shopping habits (including your crippling Halo Top™ addiction) are sold to marketing firms as data.

With that, bring on the digital shelf labels -- these are faster and easier to correct, and unlike Uber, there's no surge pricing on Organic Whole Milk at 6 in the evening going on through them.