Interesting, in my area they keep disappearing instead of breaking.

On a completely unrelated note I have a fancy £50000 puzzle on my fridge right now.

I used to go around and take the sd cards out of kiosks. I had bags of them.

The reason is labor is cheaper. The people who put up signage in shops get paid close to minimum wage and get restricted hours under 35 so corporate doesn't have to pay for benefits like healthcare. So the only incentive for changing to electonic tags is being able to charge customers more.

There's already in-store camera based tracking and ID of customers. Takes very little effort to send that ID to the PoS to use your personal pricing at checkout...

The more I think about it the more dumber it sounds... There is this terrible practice that is our society worse every day, but tomorrow with this new technology they can do it twice faster! That's bad, we should ban the technology, so they can only make our life terrible, and not double terrible!

In my state the customer would be able to reference the last visible sales tag or printed circular if no posted prices. So some granny could have an ad from whenever this all started and basically have grandfathered in grocery prices until the manager finally decides he is losing enough money and starts putting signage up again.

Couple this with some armed guards and you've done a thing.

We've had that tech for 16 years, but it's implemented differently — and costs a lot more now.

OurGroceries is one of the first apps I've downloaded in 2010. It was $5 to remove the banner ad. We paid $15 for it. $5 for me on Android in 2010. $5 for my wife on Android in 2010. And $5 for me on iOS in 2016. They since made it so where if one person buys it, everyone who shares the lists with each other gets to use it for free. Only, now it's $20.

So here's how it works. It's synced grocery lists. You can totally do this with Google Keep or any other shared note system — Apple Notes does it, too. But we did this in 2010 when we didn't have access to those (iPhones did not even come to our area until 2014!). So my wife and I would make a list. She'd drop me off at one store and then go to another. We'd put Bluetooth earbuds in our ears and go shopping together, but at different stores. We'd go down the list and call out the price. Whoever could get it cheaper would put it in their cart. We'd both check out, and then she'd swing by and pick me up.

Not illegal. No stores have kicked us out for doing it. Now imagine if you have 3+ roommates and you're on a party line.

Ain't that the truth.

We are in this trap now where we can make life easier lest we eliminate a job.

Isn't that the damn point?

God damn capitalists act as if the whole point of life is work, breed, die.

Meanwhile, we're all building on the knowledge of hundreds of generations trying to make "work" as easy and efficient as possible.

What's weird is that me and Musk probably have a common ancestor who like invented the wheel or some shit. It's more likely than not, really. That dude didn't care about billions of dollars. He just wanted to get his cart back to his hut so he could commence the breeding.

Likely not entirely accurate, since I doubt carts were invented before wheels, but you never know. We had tin cans for 50 years before we had can openers, so our ancestors did some crazy shit.

Ostensibly it still happens. Losing your job to technology frees you up to work at something a machine can't do, or spend more time doing something fun. But it depends on enough redistribution happening that you can still survive.

I remember a while back when they were getting rid of toll both collectors and going mostly "digital". There was outcry from the workers saying it will put them out of work so we shouldn't do it. Even tho it's infinitely better for everyone to just drive thru and get billed later.

Yes, but actually no. They almost certainly use cheap glob top ICs for their firmware and I'd be surprised if they can be reflashed at all. You might be able to figure out how to push your own updates to them but you'll likely be restricted to displaying a limited format. It's really going to depend on the specific model though and how open ended the manufacturer made them.

This might be what you're looking for: https://hackaday.com/2026/05/04/tagtinker-lets-you-hack-electronic-shelf-labels/

The ones I've seen look like a neat little multicolor e-paper display; been wondering how easy it would be to disassemble and repurpose just the display.

The pricing will be in some central server, so thats what you need to hack.

No you naysayers are a bunch of abusive sarcastic pricks. We corporations and policy makers are tired of being abused wahhhh now we're going to ignore you even more and also tell everybody else to ignore you. Look at us solving problems. Centrism forever!

honestly i see little reason stores shouldn't just have weekly pricing, with some sort of exception made for end-of-day discounts to get rid of stuff like rotisserie chickens and items near the expiry date.

It’s a good start but a bit trickier. I guess we also need to ban personalized pricing. If the shop is empty and someone approaches, we would not want the prices to update for that person just before they enter. Also, the price of allergy meds could still jump up just before they open the shop on a day with a high pollen count.

Price inconsistencies are primarily because companies sell half assed solutions.

Company A sells the PoS system, it's CRM, database, management seats and support.

Company B sells the e-pricetag system, its CRM, database, gateway (most either use Bluetooth or a custom 802.15.4 based protocol, ZigBee but not really), management seats and support.

Since there's literally hundreds of Company A's and Company B's, and there's absofuckinglutely no standard for either product, it's a hit and miss if the systems can actually work together - primarily because the acquisitions aren't done by involving engineers/experts who pick the best fitting system but by having some dumbass VP or C-suite who knows a guy who knows a guy (and most likely there's a nice kickback chain), and another dumbass middle manager picks the other, compatibility being potentially the least important aspect.

Then you have the clusterfuck of systems not working together, and needing someone to manage the PoS, someone to manage the price tags, and either a C-suite's 15 year old nephew who's a "programming genius" (managed to prompt Claude to write a calculator app he showed off once) gets some nice money for writing a godawful bridge between the two that kind of works when the stars align right (and breaks after three months because both systems got updated), or there's an actual underpaid gofer whose sole task is to keep the databases in sync.

Also, are those really e-pricetag bans, or hostile pricing tactics bans? I think that distinction matters.

This isn't a defense of them, more a condemnation of the system we have atrophied into... but wouldn't it be illegal for a publicaly traded company to invest a bunch of capital into a new system that didn't squeeze more profits out of people and depress employee costs further?

I'm not sure that's a job worth keeping.
Tho it meant that they can't change prices while you are in the checkout waiting for your turn.