28th September 2026
Walk into a supermarket today and most shoppers probably give little thought to the small paper labels underneath the products.
But changing those labels is a surprisingly labour-intensive business. Someone has to print the new prices, walk around the store, find the right products, remove the old labels and put the new ones in place.
That could increasingly become a job for a computer.
Electronic shelf-edge labels are spreading through the supermarket industry, allowing prices to be changed centrally and almost instantly. The technology does not, by itself, mean that supermarkets are introducing "surge pricing", but it creates the ability to change thousands of prices without sending staff around the aisles.
A UK Government impact assessment estimated that changing just one-sixth of the labels in an average supermarket could require three shop assistants working for a full week. Changing all the labels could take three employees six weeks, at an estimated labour cost of almost £9,800 per store.
Electronic labels therefore have an obvious attraction to supermarket management.
They can reduce the time spent changing prices, reduce errors and allow prices to be updated centrally. They could also make it much easier to introduce more frequent promotions or reductions.
For shoppers, however, the really interesting question is what happens next.
The technology is not the same as dynamic pricing
There is an important distinction here.
Tesco told a parliamentary committee that it did not use surge pricing and had no plans to do so. Sainsbury's also said it did not use dynamic or surge pricing.
So the arrival of electronic labels should not be interpreted as evidence that your supermarket is about to increase the price of a barbecue when the sun comes out.
But the technology makes such changes technically much easier.
The Bank of England has already identified electronic shelf labels as one of the technologies that could enable dynamic pricing in supermarkets in the future. It also points out that personalised pricing is already widespread, particularly through loyalty cards and online customer accounts.
In other words, the technology is moving faster than the business model.
We already have a simpler version of personalised pricing. Tesco Clubcard, Sainsbury's Nectar, Morrisons, Co-op and other schemes can give members one price while non-members pay another. The Government describes this as "loyalty pricing" or "dual pricing".
Electronic labels could eventually make increasingly sophisticated pricing possible.
Imagine a supermarket computer knowing that a particular product is selling unusually quickly. It could theoretically alter the price automatically. Conversely, a product approaching its use-by date could be reduced automatically to encourage somebody to buy it.
That second example is already familiar. Supermarkets routinely reduce products nearing their expiry dates.
The difference is that electronic labels could make such decisions much quicker and potentially much more widespread.
What happens to the workers?
This is perhaps the biggest unanswered question.
If computers can change prices, some of the work currently done by supermarket employees disappears.
That does not necessarily mean immediate redundancies. The staff could be moved onto other tasks such as filling shelves, preparing online orders, helping customers, checking stock or dealing with deliveries.
But supermarkets are businesses under constant pressure to control costs.
If a computer can perform a task that previously required thousands of hours of staff time, eventually management will have to consider whether all those hours are still required.
There is an important historical pattern here.
Technology rarely removes an entire occupation overnight. Instead, it removes individual tasks and changes what workers are expected to do.
The supermarket employee who once spent part of a shift changing price tickets might eventually spend that time doing something else. But if enough tasks disappear, the number of employees required in a store can eventually fall.
Prices could become more flexible
There is another possibility.
Electronic labels could actually allow supermarkets to change prices more often, because there is virtually no labour penalty for doing so.
A supermarket could theoretically have different prices at different times of the day, although that is not the current practice of the major UK supermarkets.
That could work in both directions.
A product that is selling slowly might become cheaper. A product in short supply could theoretically become more expensive.
For shoppers, this could create more opportunities for bargains but also make it harder to know what represents a genuinely good price.
The question becomes: when you walk into the shop, is the price you see likely to remain the price you see tomorrow?
That matters particularly for households trying to manage tight budgets.
Britain is already collecting much more pricing information
There is another technological change happening almost unnoticed.
The Office for National Statistics began introducing supermarket scanner data into the calculation of consumer inflation in 2026. Instead of relying on a relatively small number of manually collected prices, the ONS can analyse hundreds of millions of price points derived from supermarket sales.
The new data covers actual prices paid at the checkout and captures promotions and loyalty-card discounts much more effectively.
That means supermarkets themselves have an enormous amount of information about what people buy, when they buy it and what prices they actually pay.
The computer is therefore becoming involved at both ends of the process: deciding or communicating prices in the shop, while generating the data that tells retailers how shoppers responded.
The supermarket job may be changing
For shoppers in Caithness, there is a local dimension to this.
Supermarkets remain important employers in towns such as Wick and Thurso. They provide jobs that range from shelf filling and checkout work to management, deliveries, online shopping and customer service.
Automation does not necessarily mean those jobs disappear.
But it does mean that the traditional supermarket is gradually becoming something rather different.
The person walking around changing hundreds of little paper labels is an obvious example of a task that technology can replace.
The next stage could be computers deciding when prices should change, electronic labels communicating those changes and checkout data immediately showing whether shoppers accepted them.
The supermarket of the future may therefore have fewer people changing prices and more technology watching what customers buy.
And perhaps that leaves shoppers with one simple piece of advice.
Keep looking at the price — because just because the label is electronic doesn't mean the price is permanently fixed.
Will customers be unhappy if prices change in front of them.