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Walmart really want you to trust them.
(thelemmy.club)
On the road to fully automated luxury gay space communism.
Spreading Linux propaganda since 2020
Rules:
My shopping day aligns with a stocking/price update day at a nearby store. Somebody with a basket of price tags and a handheld has to walk the aisles, adjust the position of the tags on the shelf to match the product facings, and touch the handheld to the price tags. I also see the price tags knocked off the shelves and sitting on the floor fairly often.
I get the reduction in paper waste but a negative for the customers is that with each delivery, the prices of items can change. So the same box of cereal you buy every week now has a lower labor cost to adjust the price by 1~5% every two to four days. (With paper printed tags, you might wait for a price increase/decrease of a certain percent before taking the time to change the price on the shelf which might take months.)
Now, in the USA there's a silly "pricing to the 9's" thing. So in some cases, a small change in the cost of the goods could mean a price jump higher that the few cents per item the store is paying as stuff has its prices "rounded up" to the nearest 9 cents. So an adjusted cost of a box of cereal with its retail markup moves from 5.99$ to 6.09$ instead of 6.01$.
Paper waste (even with plastics & toxic pigments) is nothing compared to unrecyclable e-waste (batteries included).
The current implementation of such tags is also perhaps a bit silly - forcing new tech to replace paper a process 1:1 is usually the initial awkward phase of a digitalisation process (instead of revising the whole system, eg smarter e-paper shelves).
Also - oh, touch the tags to tag them so the (BLE) system knows what product they represent. Yes, that is prob always the case with the initial (re)placing, especially with non-permanent items. The shelves restocking process basically (non-discount stores prob have a bit less of that).