General > General Technical Chat
Retail products (food, consumables) qty shrinking, price THE SAME! (no surprise)
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ataradov:
If there is no power, then the store is closed. Registers won't work either.

Eink for tags is one of the better uses of "IoT".
eti:

--- Quote from: ataradov on November 23, 2019, 04:21:55 am ---If there is no power, then the store is closed. Registers won't work either.

Eink for tags is one of the better uses of "IoT".

--- End quote ---

How can anyone predict which systems lose power? I am talking about any arbitrary link in the chain going down, not JUST the store power, and within the store there's going to be fused/RCD's zones. There is NOTHING simpler than paper slips; it's irreducible complexity, so they should leave it alone. If this WAS that good, everyone would use it... but not everyone feels a need to "fix" something that was working perfectly for centuries, and which NO ONE thought about "fixing" until our ridiculous smart "revolution" came along (which is not AT ALL a "revolution", it's just an army of myriad hammers, thinking everything is a nail.)

This is all one GIANT egotistical daydream from the sci-fi obsessed fanatical fantasists, "Buck Rogers" on a Saturday morning, and are fixated on FORCING it "to become so" just because. The luxury afforded to fictional futures is that they're DEVOID of flaws, deployment errors and lack of forethought - the sci-fi version is all "magic and perfect".

Look at "AI" (LOL!) and how utterly SHIT that is... and the same protagonists think this garbage is "a revolution" also. Urrrrrm, yeah, and a BIG, sarcastic, chortling no.
james_s:
I don't think the e-ink tags are anything revolutionary but it doesn't sound like a big problem either. It's the sort of thing that can be built with cheap and proven commodity hardware, it will be reliable and offer some unique features, the day to day operation will be automated, integrated into the existing systems. So what if power is lost? You do realize that e-ink holds its state without power right?

I'm not really sure why anyone would have such a strong opinion on this one way or another. I'm sure it will be a reality soon and it's not really going to matter.

Have you been drinking? That's quite the angry rant about some silly price tags.
Halcyon:

--- Quote from: eti on November 23, 2019, 04:20:20 am ---
--- Quote from: ataradov on November 23, 2019, 04:15:19 am ---
--- Quote from: eti on November 23, 2019, 04:12:34 am ---Ah that's fantastic; finally a solution to the age-old problem of... erm, oh, hang on... QUICK - someome find a water-tight, provable justification for it - QUICK! :)

--- End quote ---
They can be updated automatically from a central database. You can change prices in real time. Just like Amazon does.

--- End quote ---

And when all this "smart" junk goes wrong, then what? A shelf-stacker could remove a paper slip and replace it in around 2-5 seconds, and no servers needed. Yet another example of making a simple, age-old system over complicated "just because"; just because you CAN do something, doesn't make the fact that you saw it through to execution, "better".

Power cut = no e-ink update = problems. People are stupid.

--- End quote ---

I'm not normally one to support "smart" technologies (especially crap you see stuffed in people's homes these days) but e-ink tags is one example of a great use of a solid and well understood technology.

There is very little to go wrong and if the tag is faulty, simply remove and provision another one. If there is an issue with the infrastructure, the tag is stuck displaying the previous price. No big deal. I can guarantee large supermarkets have some pretty tight SLAs in place when it comes to their IT and core infrastructure.

The 2-5 seconds spent replacing shelf tags, applying special pricing etc... is such a wasteful use of staff (then there is all the back-of-house maintenance such as updating databases). Multiply those few seconds by hundreds or thousands of items in a single store that need updating and straight away that time adds up. I would rather staff focus on things like keeping shelves stocked, customer service and store cleanliness than spending days changing paper tags.

Amazon, Microsoft and Google all use e-ink displays on their "sneaker-net" data transfer solutions like the AWS Snowball. Why? Because it works!

Even small local supermarkets have back-end servers and databases powering their point of sales systems. If anything was to fail, it would be due to the lack of redundancy and backups. When you go to your local store and a barcode is scanned, there are networks and systems in place right there. I honestly can't remember the last time someone manually keyed in the price of an item. An e-ink shelf tag failing is the least of their concerns (and one which is quickly, easily and cheaply resolved).
SilverSolder:

--- Quote from: Halcyon on November 23, 2019, 08:38:44 am ---[...] I honestly can't remember the last time someone manually keyed in the price of an item.  [...]

--- End quote ---

I can!

When Aldi started up in the UK many years ago, I went to one of their supermarkets to check it out.  I went to the checkout with a large trolley, filled to the brim.   At the checkout, the queue was moving so fast I barely had time to load the goods onto the conveyor belt before it was my turn, and pulled the empty trolley forward to the end of the checkout.  I swear, I was barely able to throw the goods into the empty trolley as fast as the lady was able to punch prices into the register...   I was using both hands, literally shovelling stuff into the trolley at max speed.

"Jesus, you're fast!  How can you even read the prices that fast?", I asked.  She smiled:  "We have to memorize the prices of every single product in the store.  And we only accept cash!"

No checkout I have ever seen since - manned or computerised - has been as fast.  Of course, eventually Aldi "upgraded" to the same slow processes as everyone else.

Moral of the story:  Humans are awesome!
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