Walmart rolled out light-up shelf labels that flash when you tap your phone. The labels guide you to the exact location of the item you searched for in the app. They blink. You walk toward the blinking. You find your cereal.
This system exists because customers kept asking employees where things were. The employees kept walking customers to the correct aisle. Walmart calculated the cost of those steps. They decided digital labels that light up cost less than human patience.
The technology connects to the Walmart app through some Bluetooth nonsense that probably drains your battery in forty minutes. You search for barbecue sauce. A shelf label two hundred feet away starts flashing like a discount smoke detector. You follow it. You feel like a moth with a credit score.
Retail analysts will call this innovation. They'll say it improves the customer experience. What it actually does is replace the phrase "Excuse me, where's the mustard?" with staring at your phone while shuffling through a supercenter like you're hunting Pokémon in 2016.
The labels also update prices in real time, which means Walmart can now change what you pay for eggs while you're standing there deciding if you really need eggs. Dynamic pricing meets impulse control issues. The free market installed a strobe light.
Somewhere a day trader just added Walmart to his watchlist because he thinks blinking shelf labels constitute a moat. He'll buy seventeen shares at market open. He'll tell his family it's basically like investing in Apple. He won't notice that he's betting on a company that had to invent luminous tags because its customers couldn't figure out that pasta is in aisle nine where it's been since 1997.
Photo by Marques Thomas on Unsplash
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