AFL-CIO calls for ban on such labels to protect consumers and workers from surveillance pricing and job cuts
The universal adoption of electronic shelf labels in grocery stores across the US could cost tens of thousands of jobs and billions of dollars in lost wages while further driving up grocery costs, according to a report released on Tuesday.
An analysis by the AFL-CIO Tech Institute of the label manufacturers’ own marketing materials found the universal adoption of electronic shelf labels, which are marketed to retailers as a cost-cutting measure, could cost workers between $1.6bn to $6.9bn in lost wages annually and affect between 44,223 and 191,633 jobs.
The policy brief – Priced Out, Pushed Out: Electronic Shelf Labels Raise Prices and Shrink Paychecks – calls for a ban on electronic labels to protect consumers and workers.
It would really be nice if we had an economic system where replacing a human who manually applies stickers to shelves with a centrally-managed electronic price system was an improvement to society rather than a disaster.
Ain’t that the truth.
We are in this trap now where we can make life easier lest we eliminate a job.
Isn’t that the damn point?
God damn capitalists act as if the whole point of life is work, breed, die.
Meanwhile, we’re all building on the knowledge of hundreds of generations trying to make “work” as easy and efficient as possible.
What’s weird is that me and Musk probably have a common ancestor who like invented the wheel or some shit. It’s more likely than not, really. That dude didn’t care about billions of dollars. He just wanted to get his cart back to his hut so he could commence the breeding.
Likely not entirely accurate, since I doubt carts were invented before wheels, but you never know. We had tin cans for 50 years before we had can openers, so our ancestors did some crazy shit.
Sleds were surely invented before wheels.
Well I guess you’re probably right. We invented the cart first and didn’t even think to put wheels on it till long later.
Ostensibly it still happens. Losing your job to technology frees you up to work at something a machine can’t do, or spend more time doing something fun. But it depends on enough redistribution happening that you can still survive.
In the long run, there is very little a machine can’t do. Though in some cases we have not quite invented that machine yet.
And right now the job replacement is happening at an exponentially higher level than the industrial revolution everyone compares it to.
This isn’t every cobbler going to work in a shoe factory.
Its not like everyone replaced by AI can go become a programmer or a “prompt engineer”, especually when in many cases, the AI also already does that job too.
A world where we no longer need to work is fine, but we as a society are not working towards that, because we allow the hoarding of wealth and power instead of punishing it forciboy, brutally, swiftly. We just let that corruption fester and grow.
I remember a while back when they were getting rid of toll both collectors and going mostly “digital”. There was outcry from the workers saying it will put them out of work so we shouldn’t do it. Even tho it’s infinitely better for everyone to just drive thru and get billed later.
All just to give a little more to a handful of people with more money than they could ever spend
Yeah good timing considering they’re now installed in every store. Definitely the time to throw objections.
No you naysayers are a bunch of abusive sarcastic pricks. We corporations and policy makers are tired of being abused wahhhh now we’re going to ignore you even more and also tell everybody else to ignore you. Look at us solving problems. Centrism forever!
That’s their hopes, yup
It’s probably a good thing. We have too many jobs. Everyone I talk to complains they’re working two or three jobs. So if we can get rid of these excessive jobs things will get better.
Can these be reprogrammed?
I’m not saying to steal them. I’m just saying I saw them at a clothes store and I’m just curious.
Yes, but actually no. They almost certainly use cheap glob top ICs for their firmware and I’d be surprised if they can be reflashed at all. You might be able to figure out how to push your own updates to them but you’ll likely be restricted to displaying a limited format. It’s really going to depend on the specific model though and how open ended the manufacturer made them.
how open ended the manufacturer made them.
I strongly suspect that any openness is going to be accidental.
What about just stripping the little eink displays off and hooking them to a RaspberryPi (or whatever).
The problem would be driving the display. Typically you need some kind of dedicated display driver IC which is likely baked into the control IC on these devices. It’s most likely not worth the time to try to figure out one without the other. The good news is someone linked a really cool hackaday article above where somebody worked out the control protocol on at least one model and demonstrated pushing pretty arbitrary content to the display.
The ones I’ve seen look like a neat little multicolor e-paper display; been wondering how easy it would be to disassemble and repurpose just the display.
This might be what you’re looking for: https://hackaday.com/2026/05/04/tagtinker-lets-you-hack-electronic-shelf-labels/
The pricing will be in some central server, so thats what you need to hack.
“why didn’t you say so?? If it’s a jobs program, they should be using spoons!”
Another soon to be partizan theme in the US, while in the rest of the world this has been in use for years.
