Category: business

“The new labels allow employees to change prices as often as every ten seconds.”

“If it’s hot outside, we can raise the price of water and ice cream. If there’s something that’s close to the expiration date, we can lower the price — that’s the good news,” said Phil Lempert, a grocery industry analyst…

The ability to easily change prices wasn’t mentioned in Walmart’s announcement that 2,300 stores will have the digitized shelf labels by 2026. Daniela Boscan, who participated in Walmart’s pilot of the labels in Texas, said the label’s key benefits are “increased productivity and reduced walking time,” plus quicker restocking of shelves…

As higher wages make labor more expensive, retailers big and small can benefit from the increased productivity that digitized shelf labels enable, said Santiago Gallino, a professor specializing in retail management at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. “The bottom line, at least when I talk to retailers, is the calculation of the amount of labor that they’re going to save by incorporating this. And in that sense, I don’t think that this is something that only large corporations like Walmart or Target can benefit from,” Gallino said. “I think that smaller chains can also see the potential benefit of it.”

Indeed, Walmart’s announcement calls the tech “a win” for both customers and their workers, arguing that updating prices with a mobile app means “reducing the need to walk around the store to change paper tags by hand and giving us more time to support customers in the store.” Professor Gallino tells NPR he doesn’t think Walmart will suddenly change prices — though he does think Walmart will use it to keep their offline and online prices identical.

The article also points out you can already find electronic shelf labels at other major grocers inlcuding Amazon Fresh stores and Whole Foods — and that digitized shelf labels “are even more common in stores across Europe.”

Another feature of electronic shelf labels is their product descriptions. [Grocery analyst] Lempert notes that barcodes on the new labels can provide useful details other than the price. “They can actually be used where you take your mobile device and you scan it and it can give you more information about the product — whether it’s the sourcing of the product, whether it’s gluten free, whether it’s keto friendly. That’s really the promise of what these shelf tags can do,” Lempert said.

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader loveandpeace for sharing the article.

“Rockset will become part of OpenAI and power the retrieval infrastructure backing OpenAI’s product suite,” Rockset CEO Venkat Venkataramani says in a Rockset blog post. “We’ll be helping OpenAI solve the hard database problems that AI apps face at massive scale.” Venkataramani says that current Rockset customers won’t experience “immediate change” and that the company will gradually transition them off the platform. “Some” members of Rockset’s team will move over to OpenAI, Bloomberg says.

To civil rights activists, such close collaboration has the potential to dramatically expand Flock’s car surveillance network, which already spans 4,000 cities across over 40 states and some 40,000 cameras that track vehicles by license plate, make, model, color and other identifying characteristics, like dents or bumper stickers. Lisa Femia, staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said because private entities aren’t subject to the same transparency laws as police, this sort of arrangement could “[leave] the public in the dark, while at the same time expanding a sort of mass surveillance network.”

The Verge highlights ASUS’s biggest change:
If you’ve ever been denied a warranty repair or charged for a service that was unnecessary or should’ve been free, Asus wants to hear from you at a new email address. It claims those disputes will be processed by Asus’ own staff rather than outsourced customer support agents…. The company is also apologizing today for previous experiences you might have had with repairs. “We’re very sorry to anyone who has had a negative experience with our service team. We appreciate your feedback and giving us a chance to make amends.”

It started five weeks ago when Gamers Nexus requested service for a joystick problem, according to a May 10 video. First they’d received a response wrongly telling them their damage was out of warranty — which also meant Asus could add a $20 shipping charge for the requested repair. “Somehow that turned into ASUS saying the LCD needs to be replaced, even though the joystick is covered under their repair policies,” the investigators say in the video. [They also note this response didn’t even address their original joystick problem — “only that thing that they had decided to find” — and that ASUS later made an out-of-the-blue reference to “liquid damage.”] The repair would ultimately cost $191.47, with ASUS mentioning that otherwise “the unit will be sent back un-repaired and may be disassembled.” ASUS gave them four days to respond, with some legalese adding that an out-of-warranty repair fee is non-refundable, yet still “does not guarantee that repairs can be made.”

Even when ASUS later agreed to do a free “partial” repair (providing the requested in-warranty service), the video’s investigators still received another email warning of “pending service cancellation” and return of the unit unless they spoke to “Invoice Quotation Support” immediately. The video-makers stood firm, and the in-warranty repair was later performed free — but they still concluded that “It felt like ASUS tried to scam us.” ASUS’s response was documented in a second video, with ASUS claiming it had merely been sending a list of “available” repairs (and promising that in the future ASUS would stop automatically including costs for the unrequested repair of “cosmetic imperfections” — and that they’d also change their automatic emails.)
Gamers Nexus eventually created a fourth, hour-long video confronting various company officials at Computex — which finally led to them publishing a list of ASUS’s promised improvements on Friday. Some highlights:

ASUS promises it’s “created a Task Force team to retroactively go back through a long history of customer surveys that were negative to try and fix the issues.” (The third video from Gamers Nexus warned ASUS was already on the government’s radar over its handling of warranty issues.)
ASUS also announced their repairs centers were no longer allowed to claim “customer-induced damage” (which Gamers Nexus believes “will remove some of the financial incentive to fail devices” to speed up workloads).
ASUS is creating a new U.S. support center allowing customers to choose either a refurbished board or a longer repair.

Gamers Nexus says they already have devices at ASUS repair centers — under pseudonyms — and that they “plan to continue sampling them over the next 6-12 months so we can ensure these are permanent improvements.”

And there’s one final improvement, according to Gamers Nexus. “After over a year of refusing to acknowledge the microSD card reader failures on the ROG Ally [handheld gaming console], ASUS will be posting a formal statement next week about the defect.”

Best Buy has been drastically restructuring in recent months, responding to factors like falling sales after the pandemic spiked consumer electronics spending. Best Buy CEO Corie Barry told investors in February that they should expect layoffs this year, and two months ago, mass layoffs of Geek Squad employees were reported. Barry repeated similar things during the company’s first quarter earnings call in May, saying that many of Best Buy’s moves to “right size” its business “are being implemented throughout this year.”

[…] Overland said that eBay customers have become aware of new ways to pay for items, making payments more competitive than ever before, and AmEx was no longer a necessary partner for eBay. eBay has increasingly been offering customers buy now, pay later options on purchases through Apple Pay, PayPal and other companies like Klarna and Affirm as well.

The TXSE aims to have primary listings, dual listings and exchange-traded products, according to The Wall Street Journal, which first reported the news. The stock exchange has raised $120 million in capital and plans to register with the Securities and Exchange Commission later this year, according to the press release, while it will also have a physical headquarters in Dallas, and the company will employ about 100 people, The Dallas Morning News reported. It plans to start facilitating trades in 2025 and host its first listing the following year, multiple outlets reported. The Wall Street Journal notes that past attempts at regional stock exchanges have failed, such as the Chicago Stock Exchange and Philadelphia Stock Exchange — both of which combined with the NYSE and Nasdaq.

“The NYSE considered relocating its electronic trading systems to the Dallas-Fort Worth area in late 2020, amid a proposed financial transaction tax on stocks in New York,” adds Forbes. “But the move did not go through, nor the proposed tax,.”

Polar, which manufactures semiconductors used primarily for the energy industry and electric vehicles, will use the funds to double its production capacity of sensor and power chips and upgrade its manufacturing kit, as well as adding 160 jobs to boot. Along with expanding production, the U.S. Department of Commerce said the funding would trigger additional private capital investment to “transform Polar from a majority foreign-owned in-house manufacturer to a majority U.S.-owned commercial foundry, expanding opportunities for U.S. chip designers to innovate and produce technologies domestically.” In other words – sure it’ll expand the output, but the real win is another majority U.S.-owned foundry for the White House to tout.

According to its website, Polar is currently owned by Korean conglomerate SK Group and serves as the primary fab and engineering center for Japanese firm Sanken Electric. Not exactly companies in countries with poor U.S. relations – but overseas owners, nonetheless. “This proposed investment in Polar will crowd in private capital, which will help make Polar a U.S.-based, independent foundry,” said U.S. Commerce secretary Gina Raimondo. “They will be able to expand their customer base and create a stable domestic supply of critical chips, made in America’s heartland.”

“In the latest Jeff Clarke return-to-grade-school initiative, HR will be keeping an attendance report card on employees, grading them at four levels based on how well they meet the goal of being in the office 39 days a quarter,” a source familiar with Dell told The Register, referring to the IT giant’s chief operating officer. “Employees who do not meet the attendance requirement will have their status escalated up the ladder to Jeff Clarke, who apparently believes that being a hall monitor trumps growing revenue.” From the report: Starting next Monday, May 13, the enterprise hardware slinger plans to make weekly site visit data from its badge tracking available to employees through the corporation’s human capital management software and to give them color-coded ratings that summarize their status. Those ratings are: Blue flag indicates “consistent onsite presence”; Green flag indicates “regular onsite presence”; Yellow flag indicates “some onsite presence”; Red flag indicates “limited onsite presence”.

A second Dell source explained managers aren’t on the same page about the consequences of the color tiers, with some bosses suggesting employees want to remain Blue at all times and others indicating there’s more leeway and they could put up with a few red flags. “It’s a shit show here,” we’re told. […] “Dell is tracking badge-ins and VPN connections to ensure employees are onsite when they claim they are (to deter ‘coffee badging’ or scanning your badge then going immediately home),” a third source told us. “This is likely in response to the official numbers about how many of our staff members chose to remain remote after the RTO mandate.” […]

We’re told that the goal of the worker tracking appears to be workforce attrition. “The problem is the market is soft right now for tech,” our second source, pointing to recent AWS job cuts. “Everyone is laying off.” This person anticipates further Dell layoffs over the summer, though no dates have been set. Our third source indicated that the onsite tracking policy seems unusually aggressive for Dell. “Even pre-pandemic, they never pushed or pressured folks to be in the office,” this person said. “A common phrase used to be ‘Work happens where you make it,’ with the office often being a ghost town multiple times a week, or after lunch, or pre-holidays.” Dell in February reported fiscal year 2024 revenue of $88.4 billion, down 14 percent from 2023, and profits of $3.2 billion.