Wired in the Aisles

Tony Walk dreams of a day when grocery store checkers burn paper price tags.

“It’s so ridiculous, having all these people pricing millions of cans of soup and soda by hand,” said Walk, president of American Custom Components in Anaheim. “Every day, there’s a sale. And every day, there’s millions of price tags that have to be changed.”

Hoping to automate this task, American Custom, a maker of wire connectors, started working with Tagnology Inc. of Commerce. After two years of research, they have developed an electronic network that connects thousands of miniature rectangular digital tags that can display prices of products throughout stores.

The system, dubbed SmarTag, is being installed in the five R Ranch Markets in Los Angeles and Orange counties. Tagnology’s chief executive, Mike Shalabi, is also the president of the supermarket chain.

The displays, like numbers seen on a calculator or miniature scoreboard, are on the edge of the shelf. Small wires connect the tags to each other and to a radio antenna at the end of each aisle.

A computer server in the store tracks the information shown on each tag. When a price needs to be adjusted, an employee punches in the change. The data is then transmitted from the server to the antenna on the store floor, and fed to the specific tag.

Grocery stores in Canada began using electronic tags in the mid-1980s, said Karen Brown, senior vice president for the Food Marketing Institute, a Washington trade association. Market chains in the United States started experimenting soon after.

*

P.J. Huffstutter covers high technology for The Times. She can be reached at (714) 966-7830 and at p.j.huffstutter@latimes.com