Why Merchants are Replacing Paper Price Tags with Digital Ones – Lidl Joins in 2022

It’s been a year and a half since we informed you that merchants decided to replace paper price tags with digital ones. Albert, Billa, Globus, Kaufland and Penny Market started to introduce the economically very demanding exchange in their stores – at first only in selected stores and sometimes only in selected sections. At the end of 2022, Lidl also joined. The reasons are clear.

Accurate and up-to-date

A huge advantage of digital price tags lies in the accuracy and timeliness of the data shown on them. It is about saving employees’ time when revaluation of goods. Instead of manually changing price tags, prices change automatically with the push of a button. In practice, an error can only happen if the person entering the price into the central system makes a mistake.

This is a financially very demanding change – in 2021, the Penny Market spokesperson told us Tomas Kubik he said that two and a half to three thousand digital price tags are needed for one store, and that is already an investment in the order of hundreds of thousands of crowns for one store. Nevertheless, Lidl also got involved in the transformation of price tags.

When we asked in 2021 whether they were considering a new type of price tags in Lidl, the press spokesperson Tomas Myler he replied that they are not currently planning to introduce electronic price tags. “However, we do not rule out their use in the future,” he added. Today, however, the situation is different. “We started the pilot operation of electronic price tags at the end of last year in the Nárožní store in Prague. After successful testing, we started introducing electronic price tags to other stores as well,” a Lidl press spokesman told the Vitalia server. That is, at the same time as Lidl came to Slovakia with them. Digital price tags will be available at all Czech branches until the end of this year.

Discounts are in red

They come in different sizes depending on where they are in the store. For example, in the fruit and vegetable section, there are large formats. At cash registers and small goods, they are small format.

The change compared to the previous price tags is the color, while previously the promotional prices were on bright orange paper, the new digital price tags indicate the price drop on a red background, see photo gallery.

More detailed information, for example about the saving of paper, which will now not need to be used for repricing, will be provided next week, when Lidl will announce the details of the introduction of the new type of price tags.