| I’m very surprised here. I worked in retail many years, including doing store shelf tear downs and replacement and night shift stocking. Back in the day we would get our planograms from HQ, then we’d print out all the labels on perforated paper, and walk the shelves moving product and updating the price tags, throwing out the old. The epaper tags are very clearly an improvement to that process in both time and waste. We would also check the prices using a Motorola price gun and do our fixes manually and then print out new tags or update the counts. I’m surprised these tags are just IR blasted with no security. I would have expected they’d need some sort of code and you would simply save the code on your gun, pop a tag in front of a product, scan the product, then pair the tag all on your price gun in like 3 actions. I also would have thought in these days we’d use Bluetooth beacons to triangulate the shelf slot too so that HQ could have a realtime map against their planos (it was not uncommon a product’s size would change and the layout would have holes or products that don’t fit on your real shelf). Anyways, neat project! Triggered a walk down memory lane for me. |
Previously, a criminal could just print their own shelf tags. They'd probably do this somewhere other than in the store to get the details right, but it was doable. (We've all probably seen rolls of blank shelf tags sitting around at the store, and thermal printers are inexpensive. So what if it's two crimes instead of one?)
And then, in the store, they could just switch out the shelf tag(s) and try to play their little scam.
Now with this new development, a criminal still needs to get the details right. Like a blank paper tag, the little screen is also a blank slate. It's just eraseable and rewritable in-situ.
The scam is the same. It's just shaped differently.
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I do understand why the tags are simple to write. Maintaining some kind of revolving, PKI, or multi-factor auth would be harder than doing nothing, and probably slow. Fixed, basic auth would just get leaked (probably first by Home Assistant tinkerers who find some discarded electronic shelf tags somewhere and want a new display for their house).
One-way jnfrared is cheap and low-power compared to anything with RF. And resets would be a pain in the ass if things were forever associated with a certain product, or a certain place in the store.
The way it's implemented now, on reset (yay new planogram!): All the tags get pulled and put in a pile.
And then: One by one, they're removed from that pile, put on a shelf, and programmed.
That's fast and flexible, and therefore inexpensive. Inexpensive is good. If there's one thing that all retail establishments hate most, it is their labor expense.
It does fail to prevent obvious-scam from happening. But it'd probably cost more to do it "right" than to eat the losses when the scam actually works.