Grocers’ Electronic Price Displays Set for Wider US Rollout

At grocery stores in Norway, prices can change within a matter of seconds.

As The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported Monday (July 28), these supermarkets employ electronic labels that adjust prices multiple times per day to keep up with competitors. Industry experts say it’s only a matter of time before this trend makes its way to the U.S.

“All one has to do is visit the Netherlands or Norway,” Ioannis Stamatopoulos, an associate professor who studies retail technology at the University of Texas at Austin’s business school, said in the report. “That’s a window to the future.”

While American retailers have used electronic shelf labels for years, the report notes that their arrival in grocery stores like Kroger has captured attention of lawmakers, who worried the company could use the technology to jack up prices during holidays or weather emergencies.

A Kroger spokesperson said the company doesn’t plan to use electronic tags for dynamic pricing, but rather to reduce paper waste and allow workers to spend less time tagging items.

“When you say dynamic pricing, the hair on the back of my neck kind of stands up,” Lidl US CEO Joel Rampoldt told the WSJ. “You see an electronic shelf label and the thought is going to occur to you, ‘Well this is a way to raise prices more efficiently and more quickly and to take advantage of situations.’”

Rampoldt added that Lidl, after introducing electronic shelf labels last year, plans to bring them to all of its nearly 190 U.S. stores by the end of the summer, though the company is not planning to use them to display intraday price changes.

Walmart, meanwhile, has digital shelf labels in more than 400 of its almost 4,600 American locations, with plans to get them in half its stores soon, the report added.

As these labels spread, consumers will likely see price changes while shopping, said David Bellinger, a senior analyst at Mizuho Financial Group who monitors the retail sector. However, Bellinger predicted the price changes would be infrequent or outside of store hours to keep from confusing or upsetting shoppers, and says they should mostly only go down.

Going up, he added, “would probably cause a lot of problems.”

These changes are happening as consumers’ grocery buying habits are shifting as well, as recent PYMNTS Intelligence research has shown.

Once-remote employees who have gone back to work are 60% more likely to do their grocery shopping on weekends compared to remote employees, according to “How People Pay: Consumer Spending Habits Change as Workers Return to the Office.”