Front Page
COMING TO A STORE NEAR YOU
High technology is about to reach out and ‘touch’ you again, silently but not in the dark, although that will sometimes be the case as well. This new tech cannot be considered to be a ‘thief in the night’ because it’s going to be right there in front of you in almost every retail chain across all of America. The new tech is called electronic shelf labels (ESLs).
Harmless sounding, but the impact of these new devices is going to change everything there is to change in retail when it comes to charging customers for products. These new labels are already all over the place at Kroger food stores in Illinois, Mariano’s, and Fresh Markets. The tags, as you will note in the attached photo, are innocuous, clean, and crispy clear. Even the size of the price is easy to see and read. These tags are coming to all Walmart, Costco, and Sam’s stores by the end of the summer.
The catch, which does not seem to be a catch at all at first, is in the implementation of the pricing in the back room. Prices can be changed as easily as this is being typed and just as quickly, and without the customer having a clue. What is happening with these new tags that nobody is talking about, simply because they don’t know? The prices are being changed to instantly affect all manner of life’s occurrences. The prices of cold products like ice cream and ice itself are adjusted upward instantly and almost totally unnoticeably when the temperatures rise on hot summer days.
Upwards, sometimes way upwards. The prices are easily adjusted between the time you see the product and the price tag and the time you check out. There’s no proof for you to indicate that you have been overcharged. Overcharging is not only going away as an accidental occurrence here and there it is being supported and encouraged by this new high-tech system. Oh, and the price you are so used to having on the product itself. Disappearing into the sunset because those old, stamped prices we are all so accustomed to checking on the package or product cannot be changed in order to go along with the pricing on the tags and the cash register.
These new tags and the system itself are being touted as saving the store money by controlling inventory and making it easier to shop, as well as reducing costs way down by no longer needing employees to be constantly sweeping through the store to change price tags.
Mariano’s, the store in Crystal Lake, Illinois, was kind enough to talk to the Geneva Shore Report about these new tags and the pricing. Inadvertently, when asked a question about how many people had been let go who used to do all the pricing, the answer was shocking, at least to the GSR reporters. It was 19. This article is not intended to state whether it’s better to have more jobs and lower tech or fewer jobs with high tech. It is an effect of what’s coming to a store near you soon, and already in place down in Illinois. The manager in the store the GSR interviewed got a hint of the reporter’s feelings about some of the potential negatives in this new technology’s introduction, and her response was to ask a very truthful question back: “Don’t you trust Mariano’s?”
The answer the reporter gave her back was a lie, however: “Well, of course.” Are prices going up in grocery stores right now, along with the introduction of this new high-tech system? Smoked salmon by the slice was $19.00 a pound two weeks ago. The new price two weeks later was $23.99. Ground chuck was $7.95, and at the store that day, two weeks later was $9.99. Fancy Feast canned cat food was $.84, and at the store the other day it was at $.98. There is no way to get around the fact that these are massive increases.
All these price increases are in the neighborhood of twenty-five percent, although all the reports coming out of Washington and parroted by the mass media are claiming that the inflation rate is going down. Twenty-five percent in two weeks calculates to 50 percent a month or 600 percent annual increase. After a lot of thought and consultations on the Internet, the ‘trust me’ presentation in an economic environment where profit is the overwhelming motivation for being in business at all, those two words are ringing hollow in the GSR staff’s minds.
