Work in retail without e-ink and a lot of the concerns people have here already happen with paper. We do full store paper price tag updates daily, also someone will go around with a scanner making sure prices are up to date with website and print new sheets if not.
Normal days will consist of 3-5 new batches of tickets with the full store update batch containing normally ~10-20 a4 sheets. This isn’t a huge store either I imagine most wallmarts would have more products.
The prices already update super frequently and e-inks don’t really change that. It basically just cuts out the printing and placing, the person running around with the scanner now updates prices.
I think for workers they are nice as they reduce the chance of paper cuts and the back and leg pain from changing the 100s of bottom shelf tags.
The benefit for stores is they likely don’t need to hire as many people, less training and possibly reduced material cost over time as the paper would probably add up.
TachyonTele@lemm.ee 8 months ago
It’s bound to happen. Why waste hours replacing tags when you can just change what the shelf says when the prices change.
thurstylark@lemm.ee 8 months ago
I think the main concern is that this is a step towards normalizing extremely frequent price changes, a la Uber surge pricing.
YurkshireLad@lemmy.ca 8 months ago
That’s exactly what this is. All stores will eventually do this and prices will fluctuate throughout the day.
floofloof@lemmy.ca 8 months ago
And personalized pricing, based on your profile and what they think they can get you to pay.
spizzat2@lemm.ee 8 months ago
So, if I grab an item off the shelf and browse around the store for a while, is the price going to be the price currently displayed or the price when I grabbed it?
If it’s the current price, what’s the point of a price tag? If I can’t actually know the price until checkout, then showing me the price is kind of a useless bit of data. I also suspect that the “speak to a manager” types would make that a major headache for stores.
If it’s the price when I grabbed it, how are they keeping track of that? I see two ways of handling that: one requires that you use their app to shop, and the other requires cameras and “machine vision” that are still unreliable, at best. The former seems more likely, but I doubt either is going to sit well with customers.
I haven’t seen that aspect addressed in any articles about the “feature”.
tangentism@beehaw.org 8 months ago
It will become an Olympic event where you have to get from the shelf to the till before the price changes!
TachyonTele@lemm.ee 8 months ago
I edited in another thought. I agree with that fear, that’s obviously the concern. I didn’t feel the need to repeat it.
cygnus@lemmy.ca 8 months ago
Not to sound flippant, but do you know what gross profit means? They aren’t pocketing all of that. Walmart’s net profit margin is 2.66%, which is minuscule. They make up for that by having enormous volume.
667@lemmy.radio 8 months ago
A measly $3.2b. Can hardly afford a new yacht with that!
gila@lemm.ee 8 months ago
That’s an expected tradeoff of operating an essential service is the point. It’s not as though their margin is that slim by mistake, or out of goodwill, or bad business sense. It’s meant to lead to the situation where we shop at Walmart not by choice, but in lieu of other options.
ericjmorey@beehaw.org 8 months ago
You made a good point and I immediately thought that reporting a gross profit dollar amount as an example of how profit margins are not slim as simply inappropriate ad would have responded myself if you hadn’t. There’s no single dollar figure that can inform anyone about the profit margin of a business. A number without context is useless.
TachyonTele@lemm.ee 8 months ago
Gross profit can be defined as the profit a company makes after deducting the variable costs directly associated with making and selling its products or providing its services.
Sauerkraut@discuss.tchncs.de 8 months ago
Walmart has 10.5k locations. 163B divided by 10.5K is about $15.6M per location.
Jesus, in what world is $15M profits per store location considered a “slim margin”?
unconfirmedsourcesDOTgov@lemmy.sdf.org 8 months ago
“Gross profit” is a meaningless number in this context. Their net income was $15.5B. If you do the same math to try to determine profit per location, ($15.5B/10500) it’s about $1.48M. Not bad, but still about 90% lower than your estimate.
Since I was already estimating seemingly random profit ratios, I also looked at their profit per employee, which came out to $7380/person ($15.5B/2.1M employees).
Unfortunately these numbers are also inclusive of, for example, Walmart’s e-commerce program, so calculating the profit per location doesn’t indicate anything meaningful to me, though I’m morbidly curious about what insights you are hoping to get from it?