“We also allege that in many cases both Woolworths and Coles had already planned to later place the products on a “prices dropped” or “down down” promotion before the price spike, and implemented the temporary price spike for the purpose of establishing a higher “was” price.
Went back and watched that video, love ‘not just bikes’, those instore scanners are a really good idea, Costlesworthdi should have all employed these by now.
The only reason i can think they haven’t is the same reason i’d assume for independents and IGA’s the cost. Without knowing anymore about the costs, i’d assume its a mix of upfront payments for the scanners, etc, and a, out of proportion, per transaction clip of the ticket for ‘maintenance and service costs’, just like the bank cards have.
I love what you’re suggesting though, use QR codes on each product so customers use the hardware in their pockets to scan out their items as they go.
It would reduce those upfront costs so much, and could be done with less memory bloat like the Maccas type apps. If this doesn’t already exist we should round up some of the more tech focused users/mods/admins on aussiezone and do it ourselves, then use the revenue from that as an ongoing fund for the benefit of ‘aussiezone’ as Australia’s Social Web alternative. Lets do this!
Pssst… products all already have scannable codes on them.
But yeah, Woolies rolled this out in a few of their stores last year. No need for dedicated hardware, the Woolies app does it. It took me a while to realise that actually it’s not yet available in very many stores. Just 16 in Qld, 20 in Vic, 32 in NSW, and 13 in the rest of the country combined. It just so happens that the two nearest to me are both on that list, so I got the impression that it was more common than it actually is.
But yeah, the tech does already exist as a whitelabel service. If I had to guess, I’d say Woolies rolled their own rather than using one of these, but other companies could do it without needing to do all the work themselves.