Foustland

I was shopping at the Whole Foods in Novato, CA the other day, and found that the price tags that hang on some of the shelves to tell you how much something costs are electronic.  How odd, and cool.  A friend who works for Whole Foods told me about them, and I just had to investigate.

Now these labels that I saw aren't the new sexy e-paper types that are starting to come around, but the larger LCD screen labels.  I sort of like the idea of the e-paper price labels, as they are somewhat active with their content, can run longer on a power cell than an LCD screen and seem to have more room to flash product info, all electronically, unlike the LCD variety that I witnessed at the Whole Foods.

Anyway, the labels at Whole Foods are similar in some ways, but here is the area I see them ultimately failing.  Each label unit has to have a product info sticker affixed to it.  This is sort of limiting to the technology if you need to completely rearrange a shelving unit to make room for new products or some sort of special promotion.  You aren't able to just flash the new items info onto the existing labels, you really have two options.  First, you either need to pull all label tags off and move them with their associated products to the new location, or second , relabel the label unit with new product info.  Either way, there isn't a clear advantage to the LCD style of shelf labels, other than the back office being able to instantly raise or lower a price on something.  Oh, here is the picture I took of the Whole Foods electronic shelf label.