Comment Grocery have used digital tags for decades (Score 1) 73
This is mostly fearmongering and rage-baiting. Probably not 100%, I'd concede that yes, there's almost certainly some asshole with that plan.
But the fact is that repricing is a MAJOR way for a low margin business to squeeze out some tenths of a percent, but not if they have to do it manually.
Large grocery stores (one of the consistently lowest-margin businesses) in the 1990s would - I am not kidding - have a dozen or more laser printers in the back running full-out printing new price tags for everything. Do you have any idea how much manual labor it took to have stock clerks flipping those to drop the price by 3 cents or raise it by a dime?
Digital tags let grocery stores do these changes enmasse, and look it up:
- they have NOT increased average prices above inflation over 25 years of data
- they have made temporary discounts much more available, allowing groceries to likely reduce food waste by selling things nearly expired with lower prices instead of tossing them out because nobody wanted them.