I work in retail currently. I say currently because I will only ever work for this one company in retail. I joined them because of who they are and when I leave, and I will leave, it will not be for another retail job. Some things are retail specific and we are having a sale. We are rarely not having a sale, or at least putting specific ranges or items on sale. But this is a big sale. Across the store sale.

As part of the sale we have to produce updated tags showing the previous price and the new price. They are attached to each item or groups of items. It’s labour intensive and doesn’t look fantastic. The tags tend to fall off and we spend a lot of time picking them up.

Over the years we’ve tried to improve this system by creating bigger labels by sticking the individual labels on them so that it’s easier to read, but it’s not lovely to look at even if it’s functional.

So lately we’ve turned to AI to help us. I say we, but it’s one of the younger members of staff who’s prepared to put in the time and effort to make it work. It’s quite good at taking information from a spreadsheet and formatting it and allowing us to print it out on the A5 cards that we use (the plain back of them anyway). Once the template is working correctly it is a relatively easy process and won’t print out items that we don’t have stock of. Nice. There’s a more consistent feel to it.

Specific items that are higher in price need their own display label (still A5) and so my colleague set about putting together a template for these items. They wanted to create a template that would allow us to put in certain details and print it out using the minimum amount of ink necessary. There’s no point printing a black background is there? It’s simply a waste.

It took about forty five to sixty minutes to get the five labels printed. They looked alright. Not amazing, but nice enough. But in reality there is no advantage over us taking a pen and writing the original price in the ‘WAS’ box and the new price in the ‘NOW’ box. I could have done it in less than five minutes.

So if we can use that template again in the future then that investment of time would have been worth it eventually. If not then surely it’s just easier to write it out by hand.

Just because you can doesn’t mean you should. Or am I wrong? Am I simply being old fashioned? I don’t know.