Walmart to Roll Out Electronic Shelf Labels in 2,300 Stores
Paper shelf price labels are going away at thousands of Walmart stores. The company announced late last week an expanded rollout of digital shelf labels that will allow it to update prices on over 120,000 items within minutes. Weekly updates to paper shelf labels typically took a store worker about two days. With digital labels, prices can be updated within two minutes after a few clicks through its mobile app for workers called Me@Walmart, the company said. The electronic shelf labels will also enable workers to pick products for online order fulfillment faster, Walmart said in a statement.
Total Retail's Take: This move from Walmart speaks to a couple of different trends that we've seen emerge in retail store operations in the last several years. The first is the increasing popularity of dynamic pricing — i.e., surge pricing based on demand, especially during peak hours of the day. However, Walmart was quick to note that it does not plan to adjust prices on a minute-by-minute or even hour-by-hour basis. The retailer will update select product pricing overnight when stores are closed, leaving pricing the same during the day. However, even updated on a daily basis, electronic shelf labels will provide Walmart with much greater pricing flexibility, a valuable tool to help it optimize product margins.
The second trend that this announcement from Walmart taps into is the growth in e-commerce orders being fulfilled from brick-and-mortar stores. The foundation of that service is accurate inventory management — i.e., knowing where product is (and how much) across distribution centers and stores. Electronic shelf labels will help Walmart's in-store associates to be able to identify, pick and fulfill online orders and update inventory counts more quickly and easily, leading to improved customer and employee experiences.
