Ideas & Concepts: Idea - Electronically Updated Pricing

Pitch:
Walk into any Office Depot, Target, or WalMart on a slow Sunday morning and what will you find? Multiple associates walking around with new pricing tags for displays. Little paper slips that have to be printed each week with new sales info, or new prices to coincide with sales in papers. You know what I'm talking about -- they are small pieces of paper about 1.5" long and 1/2" tall, and slide behind a thin plastic sheet.

It is monotonous, mind numbing work. And they do it week, after week, after week.

This is the information age. The computer age. Why changes prices the old fashioned way?

What if you could change the prices of all the items in your store with a click of a button, and do it instantaneously? What if sales prices for an entire region could be uploaded every week and change prices in every one of your stores in the southeast at once?

Let's take it a step further. You look at your numbers and figure out when you get a rush of customers, say 7-8PM. Based on your information, you change the pricing of your hot items during that time. Displayed next to those items price is a label "Price only good through 7:59PM!" Customers see the display and are hit with the 'sale' mentality. More purchases follow. Or perhaps you link your sales and inventory records with the system and the price changes slightly with each purchase, helping you manage supply and demand on those new laptops that just came in. You've only got 1 left and the price is 3.4% higher than the original price.

These displays will replace the antiquated paper version you see in stores today and replaces it with an electronic display. It could be as simple as red LED type displays, or advanced, small LCDs. The client decides.
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What do you think?

Eric, the only problem I see with that is say you are buying a ton of stuff you'd be scanning a million different things.

Now you might be able to connect the handhelds to some sort of promotion and have advertisers pay for it and maybe they get a discount for using it? It would work if all you wanted was to buy the new mp3 player... not if you wanted to buy the mp3 player, the bundles of CDs, and the rest of your office supplies.

How about a bar where the drink prices change like a virtual stock market?

When I was in Europe over the summer every major grocery store I went into had LED pricing. It's being done, and is only a matter of time before it hits these shores in a big way.

Don't get me wrong, I like the idea but I think it's not exactly high margin and will be commoditized quickly once it catches on here.