Jeff Wachenfeld is the General Manager of North Fork True Value in Long Island, New York. North Fork True Value was outfitted with Danavation’s Digital Smart Label™ system in October 2021.

Jeff was interviewed to give his thoughts on our system and the benefits he's seen since implementation.

“It just seems like one of those things that's going to be the future of retail. Big box stores create a very competitive market, as well as online, and in order to survive, small and medium size businesses such as myself, need to make sure that we can progress and move forward.

I wanted to come up with the latest and greatest technology and outfit the store as a set it and forget it, turnkey solution, and I think that introducing these labels was a huge step in this direction”.

"We just had two price changes come down from True Value. I would say I printed roughly 3,000, 4,000 bin tags. So, I have a team of people in my other store stickering items and I'm stickering the shelves, and up in North Fork, I have two employees standing there not doing anything because they don't have to, it's all done already.

And the shelves in North Fork are flawless. When you go into that store, everything is in a spot and it's all clean and it's brand new.”

"The program that you guys have presented to us, the app that we use to update all the tags, I just basically handed that to one of my most computer illiterate employees that I have. I said, "Here you go, figure that out." And it only took them seconds.

You guys have made it so easy that literally anyone can do it. And your support team has been there for us almost at any time. So, that shouldn't be one of the things to be worried about at all. It shouldn't even be on your radar, if you are considering moving over to digital bin tags.”

"Everyone always says, "They're going to take the jobs away." Taking jobs? No, it doesn't take anyone's jobs away. It's insane. I would never hire someone at the bare minimum of $15 an hour, to solely be installing tags on products, because that's completely unnecessary.

If you're a very small business, very, very, very small business, one that only does a couple hundred sales maybe a week. You're probably stickering each one of them and it's not going to be a big deal, you don't need electronic shelf tags. If you're a store like us, all I'm doing is taking my employees that would normally be doing tasks such as helping customers and giving them the task of tagging all the shelves.

And what does that do? That takes away from their ability to help the customers. I've been doing this for 15 years, I almost can't even go out on the floor and do those tasks. I almost can't do the tags or stocking because I'm trying to help the customers. But when you're trying to do a task and then a customer comes up to you and asks you a question and then another one comes up to ask you another question. Another one comes up to ask you another question, it just becomes insane.

So, you start to get angry at the customers, for no fault of their own, because you're trying to do another task that you can't complete. So, I don't believe this is going to take a dollar away from employees.

It's going to streamline the process of how we operate. And it's going to, inevitably at the end of the day, make a better shopping experience for the customer because they're not going to have to run around trying to find the employees that are already focused on other tasks."