E-Ink price tags at Walmart

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by Cactus Chef

I think it would put people's minds at ease if the company simply published some kind of policy that said "We will never use electronic price displays to dynamically increase the price of items above our normal MSRP or implement 'surge pricing'."

I don't expect Aldi or Lidl would do it, but other companies...ya never know.

The tags in all the shops here have to be individually programmed by the staff with a hand-held unit.

Dynamic pricing would need powered tags and WiFi, or similar.

[The Old Man]

Rf frequencies from a central location and individual batteries in each unit that last about 5 years.

[rkomar]

Do these tags even have the electronic backplanes for driving the display? I always imagined that they would be a bare e-ink layer and the "gun" would provide the electromagnetic fields to set what they display.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by rkomar

Do these tags even have the electronic backplanes for driving the display? I always imagined that they would be a bare e-ink layer and the "gun" would provide the electromagnetic fields to set what they display.

You may want to check various items on the Internet on hacking eInk price tags. Two I found useful were Hacking eInk Price Tags and a set of articles on Hackaday at e-ink price tag from years back.

The one I played with used a NFC connection so you had to walk around the store to update each tag.

[The Old Man]

https://fwdigital.net/2022/07/08/how...ice-tags-work/
Looks like various implementations. Here’s one.

[rkomar]

Ah, the price tags are more complicated than I thought. I guess they are working towards taking the updates completely out of the hands of the aisle clerks. Thanks for the links.