A low-cost radio for an electronic price label system

Point-of-sale (POS) terminals, electronic cash registers, computers, bar-code scanners, and many other products are being used today to automate the retail business. One difficult-to-automate process, however, is ensuring that the prices shown on store shelves agree with those displayed and registered at the checkout counter. In most supermarkets, paper price labels are still manually applied to shelves and display areas. This process leaves much to be desired because it is a costly, labor-intensive, error-prone operation. In addition, the erosion of customer confidence due to pricing errors can adversely affect such low-margin retail businesses as grocery stores. This paper addresses these issues and discusses the Lucent Technologies solution to a request by NCR for an electronic replacement for paper labels. The Consumer Products Group, Network Systems, and the Bell Labs Wireless Technology Research Department of Lucent Technologies, together with NCR design groups in Oiso, Japan, and Atlanta, Georgia, have developed an electronic price label (EPL) system that features two-way communications between a computer-database-driven radio and low-cost electronic price labels to ensure accuracy and reliability.