Maybe most of this is just circus to keep you worried?
The thing I don’t like about them is the BT tracking/detection. Not seen any system with the capability to track individuals, but it will show heat maps of where people spend time and clump up. This comes “free” as it’s usually zigbee or similar radios that are used, and these support BT
Yeah, I'm not actually that worried. I've seen these in use at hardware stores for quite a while now. It's just useful to assume that Walmart is planning to fuck you over. That's a good point with BT though, many of the kind of microcontrollers that would be used for this sort of thing offer BT connectivity as well.
They've been in use in the US in other retail outlets for about as long.
I suppose there was little rationalization for them in grocery stores until recently. Keep in mind grocery stores are massive chains, largely stocked by vendors - the store doesn't own a huge portion of the product, they rent out space to vendors.
So there's probably also the interaction between vendor and the chain - how the pricing update is managed.
Maybe someone more knowledgeable about how grocery works could chime in. I only have a cursory understanding. I wonder what their It systems look like, how they integrate/communicate with vendor systems.
I used to work for a company that did contract work for retail and grocery stores. For the most part, there isn't a whole lot of direct integration, unless you're talking about the huge chains and huge suppliers. Buyers make an order, that order gets tracked, shipped, added to inventory, and placed on the shelf.
Walmart is so huge and so nickel-and-dime that I'm sure they track and update prices based on a variety of factors, much like how Amazon does their micro-pricing stuff.
I prefer to think of it like there is some fake Europe wannabe out there and the poster wanted to make sure people knew he was talking about the real Europe.
Several years ago, I contracted for a short time as a software engineer for a team within Walmart that was working on an in-house digital label solution. It was pretty cool as it was all custom hardware running Android. I think the project probably could've been run better, though. I'd guess that's part of the reason they have taken so long to deploy some type of digital label solution, and ultimately went with a third party product.
Technically IoT, but usually these systems use a hub that uses some other tech to connect to the labels as wifi is really power hungry, even if you just wake up every once in a while to ask for updates, and you don't want 10000 wifi iot things polluting the bandwidth.
This month, Walmart became the latest retailer to announce it’s replacing the price stickers in its aisles with electronic shelf labels.
If there's something that’s close to the expiration date, we can lower the price — that’s the good news,” said Phil Lempert, a grocery industry analyst.
Companies across industries have caused controversy with talk of implementing surge pricing, with fast-food restaurant Wendy’s making headlines most recently.
The ability to easily change prices wasn’t mentioned in Walmart’s announcement that 2,300 stores will have the digitized shelf labels by 2026.
Walmart’s not the first major grocer to make the change, as you can already find electronic shelf labels at Whole Foods, Amazon Fresh stores, and the Midwestern chain Schnucks.
While the labels give retailers the ability to increase prices suddenly, Gallino doubts companies like Walmart will take advantage of the technology in that way.
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