Smart shelves offer plenty of potential benefits, but it’s still only potential. The fact that a progressive and sophisticated retailer like Kroger has been testing smart shelves for more than two years and has only implemented them in 14 stores is telling.

The biggest gains in smart shelves are in dynamic pricing. The retailer can offer the old blue-light special on demand and the labor savings are significant. The other benefits, such as customer engagement and inventory management, are close behind.

I still don’t think this is a consumer play, it’s an operations play.

Stupid shelves offer nothing to consumers or retailers. How often is a pricing label incorrect, missing or misplaced? Technology can solve basic shopping issues and create a world of enhancements, but it comes down to the same two issues time and again: ROI and management’s willingness to lead. ROI is dependent on tons of factors and management’s willingness is often lacking, so the Apples of the world and (if it’s really a roll-out) the Amazon Gos of the world will use innovation to be category leaders while others continue to give lip service and/or whine.

Hats off to Kroger for making a real trial of it.

In-store apps don’t work! Most shoppers are on a mission — not on a geocaching tour. Shoppers want to get through their list in a direct and efficient manner without distractions and/or interruptions. The shelves should be “smart” to make certain items are in-stock. That provides a real benefit to the shopper.

I agree with the comments so far — smart shelves are still an emerging technology. There is potential here to truly enhance the shopping experience (including augmented reality functions, personalized messages to shopper histories, etc.). However, this is still “potential.” Not only do the physical stores need to upgrade their facilities but the shoppers need to be re-trained too. This is a heck of a process on top of a routine trip which is notoriously quick.

ESL technology has been around for many years. The ROI calculations to attract retailers have been based on labor savings from manually changing pricing; a difficult return to justify. As the cost of the ESL devices continues to drop and other functionality such as in-shelf inventory technology can be added, the ROI justification will becoming easier.

Another technology that will speed the use of all shelving technology will be the Internet of Things (IoT). Instead of installing the computing infrastructure in the store to support in-shelf technologies, IoT will provide access to the shelf information using small devices connected to the Internet with shared web-based applications. This architecture should speed implementation of in-shelf technologies of all sorts.

If operationalized effectively, the smart shelves innovations could provide dividends and a quicker ROI. However, as the comments have indicated, smart shelves are still very much in the developmental, evolutionary stages.

Beacons, and real time SMS in store interactions generated a similar buzz a few years ago, however, these have yet to take off. Perhaps the combination of beacon technology, mobile payments, integrated loyalty programs, combined with innovations such as smart shelves, could be the right combination to provide significant benefits for Kroger, and their competition in the grocery arena.

Smart shelves will add to the ability to properly stock, promote, price and more. This will go well beyond grocery stores into many other retail industries. Smart shelves will allow retailers to leverage data in ways we haven’t thought of yet. And, when AI (artificial intelligence) starts to interpret the data, it will be even more powerful. Get ready for the future. Actually, it’s already here!

In-store sensing and at-shelf performance management represent another case of an overnight innovation that has taken 20 years to emerge. The tech is evolving — getting more reliable and cheaper to build and deploy. But the practices that make it useful are lagging badly. Let’s face it — a likely reason why Kroger hasn’t rolled its electronic price tags across the landscape yet is probably because it hasn’t worked out how to get the payback, at scale. With 30,000 items per store and 2,400 stores, that’s like 70 million tags to buy, install, and maintain. Not to mention the store wireless networks, back-room servers and system integration. Utter reliability is paramount too, and confidence requires more than just a quick proof-of-concept. The creative use of these devices for shopper marketing is an art in its infancy. Progress may be hard, but I firmly believe electronic price tags are are definitely coming. They are already more widespread in Europe than in the U.S. The low-hanging benefits are rapid price changes and possibly some labor savings. From… Read more »

There is definite potential for both operational and shopper experience benefits to smart shelves. We’ve seen plenty of examples of operational benefits but still deployment is slow. I think this is more a factor of the back end systems needed to support the smart shelf not being ready yet. This is a larger problem for retailers who need to invest more in infrastructure (servers, network, etc.) to support these new applications.

With shoppers, it’s more of a behavioral issue. Even if you get the shopper to download your app to enable this experience, how likely are they to look at their mobile device every time at every shelf? There are some examples of this, but it’s a complex system to deploy and it’s been a slow process (look at GameStop for their beacon deployments/tests). Overall management and installation of these technologies are still fairly complex for most retailers to handle.

Smart shelf labels are definitely the way of the future and they make a lot of sense for products that have frequent price changes, like grocery. Digital shelf label technology has been around for 20 years and Kohl’s has been using digital shelf labels in its shoe department for more than 10 years. However, the technology is getting a lot better — brighter, high resolution signs and integration with mobile apps and location-based services. Changing prices is an extremely laborious process that cost retailers a lot of time and money. While there are a lot of great benefits of digital shelf labels, probably the biggest driver of ROI is the labor savings on changing prices. According to The Cincinnati Enquirer article, a typical Kroger store takes more than two weeks to completely re-price by hand with new tags. With smart shelf labels, a representative at the corporate office could change prices at its approximately 2,800 stores within a few seconds. Not only does this save labor costs, it enables the retailer to change prices dynamically… Read more »