US consumers are about to be confronted with a store pricing system which could make the price of goods a second-by-second affair.
The campaign, which will debut in the Macy's department store in Bridgewater, New Jersey, later this month, has the potential of turning the purchase of things like soft drinks and paper towels into an exercise in instantaneous international market pricing.
"This has the very real potential to fundamentally change how people buy and sell goods down to the individual customer level," said Robert Sprague, the interim CEO of Gyricon Media, a Palo Alto-based spin-off from of Xerox, which still controls 60 percent of the firm.
"Needless to say, retailers are very, very interested."
Behind this new ever-changing consumer pricing scheme is Xerox's SmartPaper technology. SmartPaper consists of flexible, vinyl-like sheets of plastic which sandwich a thin layer of oil-filled plastic cavities. The cavities are about the diameter of a human hair.
Electrodes above or below the cavities electronically switch on or off each individual cavity's two hues. The result is a two-color, high definition sheet of "paper" that can be changed endlessly.
Unlike other types of electronic displays, SmartPaper consumes no electricity until its ordered to change. The words or pictures spelled out on the "paper" can be seen without any special backlighting and stay fixed until changed by an electronic charge.
Xerox and other companies have been testing and refining electric paper technologies for almost eight years. Newspaper companies have been eyeing SmartPaper as a way to get a page to readers without the expense of using pulp paper. However, the electronics needed to economically receive the information from a publisher and then send it to a SmartPaper page economically has yet to materialize.
But SmartPaper has some immediate and far-ranging implications for store pricing. Currently, large retailers must print and ship hundreds of thousands of price signs to stores spread out across the country.
Each sign has to then be placed on or near a collection of, say, pants or six-packs of Coke. According to Gyricon, signs in stores costs US retailers US$4.69 billion in in-store signage and labor.
Xerox said there is a potential 505,000km of pricing space in the US stores that is mostly serviced by hand placement.
SmartPaper, Sprague believes, will change all that. Take the Macy's trial: SmartPaper signs will replace paper price signs on various tables and racks of goods throughout the store. In the base of these signs is a small radio receiver, which can be ordered to change the price listed instantaneously by a computer operator beaming data from transmitters located throughout the store.
This instantaneous link between the price sign and a store computer, Sprague said, turns a store floor into an ever-changing marketplace.
"The technology erases any lag time between market conditions and customer prices," Sprague said.
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