Wal-Mart Customer Price Checker On The Sales Floor (1992)

Building a Better Price Checker: Leveraging Telxon RF and the Series 1 item file to out-engineer the competition for a fraction of the cost.

I had heard about a price checker that Toys “R” Us had installed, though I hadn’t seen it in person. I tracked down a store that had one and went to investigate. From a customer standpoint, it looked pretty cool, but their implementation was massive, with a lot of heavy advertising around the unit.

We guesstimated that we could build something better suited to our specific needs — and for a lot less money. Since we already had Telxon RF handhelds in the stores, we already had a network we could leverage.

The Prototype

I had Telxon build a stripped-down unit that provided a screen output and a scanner input. We tied the unit into the Series 1 item file to pull real-time pricing. It worked perfectly from a technical standpoint.

We had the Wal-Mart fixture shop — the guys who built the wooden cabinets for the stores — create two different configurations for a pilot. One was a freestanding cabinet, and the other was pole-mounted. Because of the hardware requirements, we could only place them in locations that already had existing power. We put the freestanding unit in Apparel and the pole-mounted version in Housewares.

Unexpected Customer Behavior

The customers definitely used them; they were a total novelty at the time. However, both units triggered some very unexpected behaviors that we hadn’t planned for.

In Apparel, the kids loved to make the machine beep. They would pick up an item, scan it a dozen times, and then just leave the merchandise sitting on top of the scanner. Sometimes they’d even tear a tag off an item just to scan it. An associate had to play “zone defense” on that area several times a day just to keep it tidy.

In Housewares, the pole-mounted unit was at adult face height, so kids didn’t mess with it as much. However, we found that adults act like kids sometimes. Once they checked a price, if they decided they didn’t want the item, they would just ditch it on the nearest shelf rather than walking it back to where it belonged.

The Rollout

We learned a lot from that initial test. We refined the design, spent more time on the durability and ergonomics of the enclosure, and eventually rolled several units out to every store. One thing was certain after the pilot: we went with pole mounts only.

This story is part of Retail Tales Never Told, a collection documenting Robert Davis’s 35 years of retail evolution from the backrooms of the giants to the modern homestead in the Cascades.

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