Put A Tag On It

The pricing gun should have been a dead technology years before it actually was. But state laws artificially kept it around as a shield against the scary barcode.Today in Tedium: Determining how much something costs shouldn’t be difficult, but in an ecosystem where everything is driven by highly personalized data, concerns are rising that prices might not be on stable ground. Recently, some states and regulators have started to scrutinize e-paper price tags out of a concern that those tags will enable pricing that adapts to demand—or worse, to the customer. A major union, the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union (UFCW), even announced plans to launch a campaign against electronic shelf labels, as they’re called. But what if I were to tell you that this concern is not in fact a new one, and it more or less played out like this 50 years ago, on a technology that most people take for granted today? That’s right, we’re talking about barcodes, along with its predecessor…