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.

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