ttle paper printing and manual changing of price tickets required.” Wesfarmers has taken a similar view at Bunnings, while Coles is moving more cautiously, keeping the system in trial stores. Behind the efficiency lies an inevitable question: digitising the shelf allows pricing to move in real time and brings dynamic pricing into play. This is a time when shelf labels are doing more than replacing paper tickets; they are turning pricing into dynamic software. The old rhythm of weekly ticket changes, printed in batches and swapped by staff, gives way to a system where thousands of prices can be changed centrally in just minutes. Reuters reported in 2024 that Walmart’s digital tags would allow price updates on more than 120,000 items within minutes, compared with about two days of labour for weekly paper updates, while prices would still most likely be reviewed overnight rather than swung through the trading day. This nouveau technology makes dynamic pricing possible, but it does not dictate how aggressively a retailer uses it. In Australia, the most plausible near-term use case is not the airline model, with fares shifting hour by hour, but a more restrained supermarket version built around markdowns, promotions and local competitive response. Woolworths has framed its tags in terms of efficiency, paper reduction and freeing staff for customer-facing work, and Bunnings has used similar language around manual processes. In practice, that means faster promotional execution, cleaner compliance between the shelf and the register and more precise markdowns in fresh categories where clearing stock before expiry protects both margin and waste targets.  The regulatory position  The ACCC’s guidance is clear: surge or dynamic pricing is not illegal in itself, but businesses must communicate clear, accurate prices. They must not make false or misleading claims about the price consumers will pay. Since the supermarket inquiry, the political climate has become less forgiving. The Treasury announced in December that the Food and Grocery Code of Conduct will become mandatory from 1 July 2026, strengthening obligations on large retailers in their dealings with suppliers and increasing ACCC enforcement powers. The most interesting future use of electronic shelf labels is in addressing the softer and harder-to-police edges of retail pricing, store-by-store variation, loyalty-linked offers, real-time promotional responses, and more frequent changes to markdown cadence. Professor Gary Mortimer put the practical limit on that clearly when he told ABC Radio, “I don’t think we’ll ever see dynamic pricing where a supermarket can push prices up or down any sort of hourly or two or three hour sort of time frames.” That feels right in the current Australian context, where reputational risk is likely to be a stronger restraint than technological limitation.  Overseas, retailers and regulators are already testing those boundaries. In the United States, Walmart has clarified its position and, after scrutiny over dynamic pricing, said its digital shelf labels would not be used to change prices throughout the day, with updates instead tied to standard pricing cycles such as overnight resets, Reuters reported. Political pressure is subsequently building, and US lawmakers, including Elizabeth Warren, who warned that “widespread adoption of digital price tags appears poised to enable large grocery stores to squeeze consumers to increase profits”. In Europe, the case has been framed differently, with retailers such as Carrefour and Tesco positioning digital shelf labels as operational tools, linking them to labour savings, pricing accuracy, and reduced paper use across large store networks. Academic work in the United States, including research from the University of Texas at Austin, has also tempered some of the more extreme claims, finding no evidence that the adoption of electronic shelf labels led to price surges at the retailer studied. For Australian supermarkets, then, the live issue is less whether the skeleton exists, because it plainly does, but more so whether grocery is the right category in which to test the social limits of algorithmic pricing. Food retail is not air travel, hotel inventory, or ride-share transport; it sits much closer to necessity, routine, and household pressure. That is why even a mild form of dynamic pricing could become politically combustible if shoppers begin to feel they are seeing a different system from the one they were promised.  One listener to the ABC’s Life Matters program put the instinctive backlash plainly, calling dynamic pricing “just plain greed”. Another questioned the basic trust model, saying shoppers would be asked to believe “the demand is high when they’re not a disinterested party”. Supermarkets can do this. The more difficult question, and the one likely to define the next phase of the debate, is whether they should.