Tag It!

The day of stamped prices on top of merchandise may be coming to an end. It did result with prices being stamped on every product but it’s a very labor intensive operation. When the bar codes and computerized cash registers arrived, it was seen as a more efficient system but there were bugs.

One of the problems with this system is that the shelf tags may not match the current price in a store’s computer. When a grocery store manager conducted a “price integrity audit” comparing price labels to store computer labels, paper labels are only 95% to 96% correct. Mismatches occur when workers print out new labels and try to match them with the merchandise on the shelves. Sometimes products are overlooked or mislabeled which can cause jam ups at the cashier line and lost sales. So Electronic Shelf Labels or (ESL) was invented by Altierre, a digital tag and sensor maker based in San Jose, Calif.

How Electronic Shelf Labels Work

ESL has a simple and productive updating price approach to solving the shelf merchandise problem. Prices are programmed into the Head Place or store’s POS procedure which is then sent to a radio frequency communication unit. This unit, in turn, sends a command to the electronic shelf labels and instantly adjusts the price display screen.

ESLs improve the shoppers' influence for point-of-purchase and allow the vendors to be able to go with pricing procedures that are focused on margin maximization. It permits the vendors to be aggressive and proactive in time-of-day pricing and keep ahead of the competition. Event pricing can be programmed to be in step with promotions on specialty items or categories. With this type of labeling there can be built in advertising and marketing promotions with price guarantees.

The tag has the ability to provide multiple screens of product information. If the customer is allergic to say, peanuts, the list of ingredients with a peanut alert would pop up and the customer would see that symbol.

So why aren’t the Electronic Shelf Labels being used everywhere? When Sunit Saxena, Altierre’s chief executive, was asked why grocery stores haven’t leapt at the chance to save themselves money by installing the tags. “They’re treading carefully because the fear is, they’ll put 30,000 of these in a store where people are used to seeing paper and it will be a drastic change,” he said.

“They worry that their sales will drop.” In the United States, grocery stores still cannot justify making the investment in digital price tags, says Patrick C. Fitzpatrick, president of Atlanta Retail Consulting. “If the payback was advantageous, you’d see them everywhere.”

People will get used to the new digital shelf tags when they are finally used. The Electronic Shelf Tags will be advantageous in assisting store employees to count correctly and validate the stock on hand. When there are sales, the exact amount of what is sold and what is still there will be at the touch of a fingertip.

Photo courtesy of morguefile.com