people are freaking out about walmart digital price tags
Making the rounds in the news right now is Walmart planning to implement digital price tags in their stores before the end of 2026.
What people seem to gloss over however is Kroger beat them to it. I saw them in person myself.
Am I freaked out about these tags?
No, because it's better than the alternatives that I'll describe in a moment.
First thing to mention is the tags appear to use a similar screen technology to the Kindle Paperwhite. I have to admit that these tags are very easy to read, even from a distance.
I do like that these tags are not like staring into light bulbs, so the screen tech is good on the eyes.
What comes to mind immediately however is the question of how these tags will stand up to use over time. Okay, so it uses a screen technology that's very good on using the least amount of battery power, and dead pixels really aren't a concern. But these things are plastic and they're going to get banged and scratched up.
The Kroger store I was in was very new, so of course all the tags look pristine, free from any scratches whatsoever:
...but you know that's not going to last long. And while I understand the aesthetic decision to go with a white plastic, that's going to look like shit later when it starts yellowing and looking nasty.
Probably would have been a better idea to use "Kroger blue" for the case color, as I'm certain that would stand a better chance of not looking as bad once these things start getting banged up. It also would have been better if the bezel was diffused/textured instead of shiny, especially since scannable bar codes are present, but whatever.
Why no QR codes on the screens? That's probably for two reasons. Screen resolution limitations, and the fact many products in grocery stores still have no scannable QRs on the packaging. QRs won't happen on these tags until every single frickin' product in the store has a QR on it, which would include stickers for produce. I can see that happening at some point, but definitely not now.
Here are the alternatives we thankfully don't have to deal with
Before I state what the alternatives are, yes, it's true digital tags means prices can change at any time. How pricing is handled will completely depend on how many customers the store manager wants to piss off on any given day. More on that in a moment.
These are the two alternatives, both of which are infinitely worse than digital tags:
Nightmare alternative #1: Giant high-mounted screens every few feet.
Imagine there are no price tags on anything, and instead you go to a shelf, and there's a sign instructing you to look up at a screen to see a list of products for sale on that shelf. The screen would have to be there because there's nowhere else to put it.
Now imagine craning your head back, looking up, then having to do that many times just to see the price of anything.
How long would it take before you got sick of looking up? I'll tell you. About ten seconds.
Nightmare alternative #2: A screen mounted on every single shopping cart.
Yeah, you know these would break so fast it wouldn't even be funny. Massive cost to mount screens on all the carts, constant charging of batteries, screens failing left and right, screens getting beaten by the sun from being left outside... total nightmare.
I am absolutely certain some idiot pitched an idea for this, but thankfully it never went beyond that stage.
In the end, it's up to the store managers
The store managers are the ones who, at times, directly answer to the customers.
There is no store manager who wakes up each morning before work, and says, "Gee, I wonder whom I can piss off today?" Any manager knows that if you adjust a price on anything even by as little as 5 cents in the upwards direction, someone is going to give them an earful about it. It'll probably be a customer on fixed income who will promptly march to the customer service desk and demand to speak to the manager any time a price changes.
A store manager's decisions really will dictate if these digital tags work or not. Kroger obviously spent a bunch of money on these tags. The tech works, but what nobody knows yet is if it ends up being agreeable with both the managers and customers.
If the managers have been told out of the gate to play things cautiously, then the digital tags shouldn't ruffle too many feathers. But if the managers start wildly adjusting prices all crazy-like, then the tags won't last long and the money spent on them will have been wasted.
we are closer to 2036 than 2015
If the movie Back To The Future were made today, Marty McFly would be traveling back in time to the year 1996.
I'm getting older. Does that bother me?
No.
Did it at one point? Yes. My mid-to-late forties is when getting older bothered me. But then I got over it.
Quitting the barber was part of getting over it. Knowing it's a bad idea owning a giant bulky electronic machine just for nostalgia's sake is another part.
There's also the very Gen X thing, the Whatever Factor. I know this one well, as does every other Gen X. It's absolutely a '90s attitude.
Example: "If you want this discount on Product, you must sign up using our app to get it."
Gen X Whatever response: "Then the discount doesn't exist. I'll shop elsewhere. Whatever."
Another example: "There's a shortage of eggs! You should be concerned! Panic!"
Gen X Whatever response: "No. I'll just eat something else. Whatever."
There isn't any yelling, nor arguing, nor "I gotta DO something about this!" None of that. Just whatever...
The Whatever Factor has kicked in concerned my age. I realize that putting any needless stress on myself for you're-getting-old stuff that doesn't even matter is seriously stupid.
Whatever.
run.app spam is happening using google mail servers
I'm already at the point with my email where I block anything containing firebaseapp (Firebase is Google's mobile/web app dev platform), and now I've had to block another, which is anything in an email containing run.app, the official domain associated with Google Cloud Run.
Crap like this is received in email, and it's obviously spam:
Look at the headers, and you see this:
Examine the email, and the run.app crap is present:
I know how to find and block this garbage, but I seriously doubt others would even know how to spot it. And since emails like this come from Google's own mail servers, they're "trusted" and will bust right through spam filters.
Ridiculous.
absolutely useless sign
I was in this mall parking area recently, part of which was semi-open to the outside. The sides were completely open, hence why I call it a parking area and not technically a garage since it's literally impossible to seal it off.
Then I see a sign, "IDLE FREE ZONE. TURN OFF ENGINES". And, sure enough, someone was parked a short distance away, sitting in their car, engine running. Actually, that's not entirely correct. There was someone else a few parking lanes away doing the exact same thing.
Was there any mall security around?
Nope. Not a rent-a-cop in sight.
Was I upset about this? Nope, because that sign is completely useless. It's purposely mounted high up, meaning nobody driving around would actually see it, even as large as it is. It's also facing away from the parking area.
That sign, which probably cost the mall a hundred bucks (remember, somebody had to install it and they got paid by the hour), is the mall saying, "This sign isn't for you. Just go in and please buy stuff."
Who is that sign for? Not for anyone that parks there. The purpose of the sign is to get someone else to stop harassing mall management about whatever it was about an idling car that put sand up their ass.
Did you know...
...that you can outright buy a metal sign that completely looks "official" with whatever text you want on it?
Oh, the fun you could have!
two things makes computers slow more than anything else
Computers from years ago were slow for a number of reasons. Slow seek time on the hard drive, low amount of RAM, an operating system choked with a bunch of bloatware, and so on.
Today, computers are only slow for only two reasons.
First, the internet itself.
With anything internet-based, you wait while things load from a remote server. I don't think people really appreciate how much waiting there actually is to do anything online.
And it doesn't help that so many programs are "required" to connect to the internet by design. This means that no matter what, any program that connects to the internet means you wait. A lot.
Second, the web browser.
A web browser these days is like running an entire operating system in your operating system. The level of crap a browser loads both locally and online is insane, and all the crap a browser does in the background is also insane.
Want to see your computer run fast? Use programs that don't connect to the internet at all. With the exception of super chunky stuff like editing giant photos and/or videos, everything is quick.
My phone, which is "old", probably has 100x the computing power compared to the my first PC with Windows (version 3.1, thank you very much) did. But try to do anything online and sloooowwwww.
The primary browser on my phone is DuckDuckGo. Yes, they have a mobile browser. The reason I run it is because it blocks a lot of crap and connects to the least amount of stuff while still delivering a modern mobile browser experience...
...but it's still slow. Fault of the browser? No. Fault of my connection speed? No. It's the fault of the internet.
Since my site doesn't load any needless crap, oh yeah, loads super fast on anything, including the phone. My site isn't on any high-tier super fast ultra business class server or anything like that. It loads fast because it's crap-free. How I wish other web sites were like that.
Try and load a banking web site (especially one that's for a credit card) on your phone in the browser and you'll feel like you're on dialup internet all over again, if you're old enough to remember that experience. Using DuckDuckGo will make the experience slightly better, but that browser can't fix a web site that's a slow-loading pig.
Or better yet, try loading any popular social media site in the browser. Stuttering, pausing, jumpy pages, and ridiculous amounts of background crap happen when all you want to do is send a message, view a photo or watch a video.
This is 2026 internet? Seriously?