this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2024
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Technology
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It's bound to happen. Why waste hours replacing tags when you can just change what the shelf says when the prices change.
But this article is so pro Walmart it's crazy.
Slim profit margins my ass. Walmarts gross profit for the twelve months ending July 31, 2024 was $163.786B,
I think the main concern is that this is a step towards normalizing extremely frequent price changes, a la Uber surge pricing.
Take a photo of it, I work with paper but we change our tags frequently. We often have prices changed when a customer reaches checkout. I've also had times where a customer came back to check a shelf tag after I just updated it. I honored the previous price those times as I was still holding the tickets but its not a guarantee even in paper stores.
I know this isn't your fault or anything but damn, that seems lightly customer hostile at best, and deeply unethical at worst. It sounds like it should be illegal.
That sounds very illegal, yeah. You can't advertise a price and then charge something different. It doesn't matter that the person didn't notice it. At that point you might not have price tags at all (which is also illegal, just FYI).
I can't speak internationally or legally but from what I know from friends in similar jobs daily prices changes aren't uncommon. The reason and when it happens often is normally the start of the day when there is a new batch of tickets. They don't go up instantly and multiple 100s of tickets normally take a couple hours to get placed depending on how many/busy staff are.
Main thing is e-ink's don't really make this significantly better or worse. I personally think they are neat for the end worker. The problem is that this is allowed or not enforced well.
Its not that it can't happen now. Its that it will happen all the time with digital tags.