• lnxtx@feddit.nl
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    5 months ago

    Looks like the US is like 10 years behind the Europe.

    But if I understand correctly those electronic shelf labels will be remote controlled. IoT?

    • BearOfaTime@lemm.ee
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      5 months ago

      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.

    • Oisteink@feddit.nl
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      5 months ago

      They are - and they’re e-ink based so power lasts a long time. I’ve not been to a store that don’t have them in many years.

      They’re great - always showing the correct price/ amount, and it’s less hassle for the store to change.

      As long as you have a free market and not a coordinated one it will work out great for you guys too

      • nolefan33@sh.itjust.works
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        5 months ago

        As long as you have a free market and not a coordinated one it will work out great for you guys too

        Ah, so we’re fucked

        • Oisteink@feddit.nl
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          5 months ago

          Aren’t they already in use by some stores? M

          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

          • nolefan33@sh.itjust.works
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            5 months ago

            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.

    • JohnEdwa@sopuli.xyz
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      5 months ago

      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.

    • pushECX@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      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.