Today I went to Tesco - a large supermarket in the UK - to buy 3 items required for dinner. I also planned to buy some chocolate of some sort.
I bought the requirements, and passed by a the crisps (potato chips) aisle on my way to the chocolate. A glance half an aisle away told me that one of the three or four kinds of crisps my partner takes to work was on offer, I had half an aisles walking where I thought about it and ended up buying it.
In the chocolate aisle I ended up buying a large bag of white chocolate that was particularly well priced (I could read every label from one place). As chocolate is a guilty luxury I've been known to leave without it if my deliberations last too long; being able to parse the information quickly led to a purchase.
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So that is why. Most shoppers are both immediately price driven and don't want to be there. This can be used to increase spends.
Interestingly I know a little about why Tesco doesn’t use eInk price tags, having talked at length with one of the people that evaluated eInk tags for Tesco.
Top reason was simply price and maintenance. Deploy this kind of tech to 3400 stores is seriously non-trivial (something I know, from having attempted to build and sell tech to Tesco), and even very low unit costs compound fast.
Tesco top concerns with this type of tech are:
1. Price. Tesco is very capex sensitive. They generally only want to spend money on assets that have multiple uses.
2. Will it work 100% of time, or very close to it. Incorrect price tags are a serious issue for Tesco.
3. Who fixes it when it goes wrong and how?
Again these don’t seem like hard issues, but 3400 physical store makes it hard. Especially when you can’t rely on store staff to deal with uncommon problems, they aren’t given the time or training, due to retails razor thin margins.
One of the interesting non-obvious problem Tesco had with eInk price tags was simply making sure the right product tag appeared on the right shelf in the right place. This is despite has a very competent stock management system that tracks exactly what item lives on what shelf.
With paper you just swap the tags and move on. With eInk displays you can’t do that because then physical location of a tag will no longer match it’s stored virtual location.
I don't understand why Tesco couldn't just start some pilot in a handful of stores, iron out the kinks, learn about reliability problems etc. and only after that decide whether or not to roll out the tech in all stores. That's what basically every supermarket chain here does (it has to be said they are often franchises here). For example, self-scanning in the supermarket chain I've been shopping at for years started used to be in only a handful of stores, but slowly more and more stores are getting the tech.
Same for the e-ink price tags, I've spotted them in two different supermarkets of the same chain so far but I'm 100% sure that in ~2 years literally all of them will have them.
Traditionally brick and mortar retailers, for whatever reason, don't seem to use pilots and rollouts.
At least not to the extent expected.
The closest explanation I can think of is that so much of store operations' focus is on standardization (which itself is a tough problem), that deliberately disturbing standardization seems anathema.
That said, it's definitely changing in some chains. But you'll still get tons of blank looks or red tape in most, if you want to run an experiment like that.
I am a field tech for retail stores and see new technology being piloted all the time.
Rollouts are how they survive. Every tech refresh cycle is an enormous project handled by roaming teams who travel. I have done a 9-month rollout project for a huge chain. It was a great year. :)
Indeed. I was involved in trying to get some shoplifting prevention tech to POC at a single Sainsbury's location and we ran into similar issues. Unfortunately it the company wound down before we found out whether we could overcome them.
Context: Kohl's is a volume reseller, clearinghouse; known for selling products on significant discount that did not sell on the first shelf the products were on.
They advertise their % off original retail to increase volumes of sales.
Price is their theoretical business, if the products were enticing enough themselves they'd not have made it to Kohls.
Not sure about other people but for me if the price tag is not easily legible I most of the times don't bother with said item, unless it is an item that I purchase regularly and for which I know the price and especially the price per kg (I'm talking mostly about food products, here).
