The familiar sight of brightly coloured printed prices on supermarket shelves could soon be a thing of the past as big-name retailers weigh up going digital.
Not only have some Carrefour and Lidl outlets in Europe switched over to using electronic or digital labels, but across the Atlantic Ocean, Walmart, the world’s biggest retailer, is to install the technology in 2,300 of its US outlets in a move that could sway more of the industry to follow suit.
Walmart’s management believes the change will not only mean "an even better shopping experience" but will reduce the need for staff "to walk around the store to change paper tags by hand."
The retailer's announcement came after a trial deployment in a Texas outlet yielded "increased productivity," with workers able to update prices "with a few clicks" on an app and then "spend more time assisting customers."
But the jury has long been out on whether ditching paper labels would be a good thing for shoppers or businesses.
After all, it is around three decades since electronic or digital labels were first tested by UK retailers. And only last year, supermarker chain ASDA tried them out in one of its outlets, but has not gone ahead with a wider deployment of the technology, which industry insiders say is expensive to buy and install.
"Digital labels can indeed offer notable efficiency gains for pricing, provided that the right IT solutions are available," said Christel Delberghe, director general of EuroCommerce, which represents retailers and wholesalers, who warned that "initial investments can be significant."
The Walmart move could prove pivotal, however. With a headcount of around 2 million, Walmart is by some estimates the world’s biggest corporate employer. Its $611 billion revenue for 2023 - roughly the size of Sweden's gross domestic product - left it the biggest company in the US at year-end, after taking in almost $100 billion more than Amazon and almost twice the amount reported by Apple.
"Certainly the Walmart rollout could well influence any other big box retailers to do likewise – as in the past with new technologies, for example, self-checkout, other retailers do often follow Walmart’s lead," said Alan Burt, retail technology lead at RBR Data Services, part of Datos Insights.
Walmart’s move followed similar announcements by Whole Foods, another US retailer, and Woolworths, a household name in Australia. But shoppers Down Under complained that the electronic format - which in some cases can look like a plain digital watch or clock - was not always easy to read.
Proponents of the technology say it could benefit shoppers - many of them hard-hit in recent years by consumer price inflation - by quickly ensuring deductions are applied to items near to their use by or best before dates.
And some electronic label manufacturers, such as Sweden-headquartered Pricer, offer versions that can display several colors at the same time.
For retailers, the changeover could "greatly reduce price display errors" and "save costs in the longer term by saving time on printing paper displays," according to Raphael Moreau, research consultant at Euromonitor International.
According to management consultancy McKinsey, if digital labels "become more affordable for retailers," they could "further enable real-time pricing."
Real-time or "dynamic" pricing is widely used in online retail and in sectors such as travel and transport, customers have at times been left perplexed, even left irate, after seeing prices of flights or ride-sharing rates sometimes being changed by the minute and in the middle of choosing a fare.
If used in shops, dynamic or "real-time" pricing could see the cost of items fluctuate throughout the day, depending on supply and demand, as well as be changed on the hoof by floor staff using an app or by someone on an office computer.
This in turn could see shoppers left confused by price changes kicking in even in the time it takes from dropping an item in a basket or trolley and paying up at a cash register.
And the move to digital shelf labels could be accompanied or followed by the shifting of information about nutrition and origin from product wrappers or boxes to digital or online-only formats.
Such details "must be displayed on the product," said Pauline Constant of the European Consumer Organisation (BEUC), warning that "supermarkets are time-pressured environments where consumers make purchasing decisions in a matter of seconds."
