[trome]

The cost and wiring to power eink displays is too much, due to the USD being fairly stable, prices don't change daily/hourly, which would help eink signage for shelving make sense.

You essentially either need a power drop to each section of shelving, or you have to replace batteries on every sign through your store every X months or years.

[wikibob]

Actually eInk price displays, known as Electronic Shelf Labels (ESL's) [0] are extensive deployed in many retailers.

You can see the labels available from Pricer, one of the big players in the space: http://www.pricer.com/en/Solutions/

France retailer Carrefour uses ESLs in all their stores, for every SKU. They use ESL's from Pricer who says Carrefour uses 12 million labels, deployed in 2004, and they are updated via in ceiling infrared transmitters. [1]

ESL's are also common in Germany. And in the USA some Whole Foods use them.

This random blog claims "The ESL market is estimated to grow from 186.5 million dollars to 399.6 million dollars by 2020" [2]

Ses-imagotag showcases some interesting applications of their tags including manufacturing [3] and office use.

Finally a list of companies in the space [4]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_shelf_label

[1] http://www.pricer.com/en/PressRoom/Case-Studies/Electronic-S...

[2] http://www.retailintelligencelab.com/blog/2016/11/24/the-ris...

[3] http://www.ses-imagotag.com/en/benefits/

[4] https://iot-daily.com/2015/03/19/best-electronic-shelf-label...

[wikibob]

This is pretty awesome. The system is smarter than I thought when I saw it in-store.

Since the tags are networked with infrared, they can flash on command. For example when store employees are trying to find a particular product for stocking, or retrieving it for a delivery order (example safeway.com delivery).

http://www.pricer.com/en/Solutions/Store-Manage-Solutions/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrtO8qVmezM

[easychris]

We have a grocery store in Krefeld, Germany, which uses e-ink price tags exclusively[1]. But I never noticed a real-time change when I was shopping there.

[1] http://www.lebensmittelzeitung.net/storechecks/Neues-Real-Ko... (e.g. pics 9, 20-24).

[gerbal]

There are lot of wireless E-ink displays for sale that advertise 5-year battery life with a simple button cell. For like $10/label.

[copperx]

Kohl's stores in the US already do this, although they're not grocers.

[NordSteve]

Grocery stores have order of magnitude more SKUs than Kohls, and operate on smaller margins.