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.
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.
This might be what you’re looking for: https://hackaday.com/2026/05/04/tagtinker-lets-you-hack-electronic-shelf-labels/
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.
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.
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 pricing will be in some central server, so thats what you need to hack.