IW Technologies

Fair warning: we walked into Anderson Humane to drop off donations and very nearly walked out with several new coworkers. (The four-legged kind.)

All throughout May, all IW team members across the company pitched in to collect dog food, cat food, and pet supplies for the animals at Anderson Animal Shelter. And when the month wrapped up, we packed an SUV to the ceiling. The animals at Anderson are going to be eating well for a while.

It was a true company-wide effort, and the generosity that poured in says a lot about the people we get to work with.

Huge thanks to the team at Anderson Humane for the work they do every single day, and for letting us hang out with a few very good boys and girls while we were there. Saying no to those faces took more willpower than any of us expected.
To the dogs, cats, and critters at Anderson: this one's for you.

ESLs don’t usually fail in the demo. They fail when the rollout hits the sales floor.

Store 115 doesn’t match the prototype.
The shelving layout changed after the last remodel.
A rail that worked in apparel doesn’t fit beauty.
A gateway looks fine on the floor plan but leaves dead zones near the back wall.
An overnight install window turns into rework the next morning.

That’s where deployments either stay controlled or start creating problems store teams have to live with.

A single store can mean 20,000 to 60,000 labels.

That’s thousands of mount points, assets to track, batteries to manage, and devices that eventually need service or disposition.

That’s not signage. That’s infrastructure.

Mike Thornton has spent 20+ years in store technology rollouts where these details determine whether projects scale cleanly or turn into constant maintenance. He breaks down why ESL success depends on the teams that rarely get talked about early enough:

Procurement | Deployment | Low-voltage| Field service | Maintenance |Disposition.

Because once ESLs hit the sales floor, software alone doesn’t fix broken rails, signal dead zones, bad mounting, or lifecycle gaps. Experienced ex*****on does.

Read more at https://www.weareiw.com/blog/electronic-shelf-label-deployment/

If Electronic Shelf Labels (ESLs) ROI is only modeled as paper tag savings, the business case is incomplete.

In grocery, labor is only one part of the equation.

The stronger question is how ESLs change ex*****on at scale.

Because pricing work touches more than tags.

It affects promo accuracy.
Markdown timing.
Front-end disputes.
Shrink exposure.
Fresh department ex*****on.
Store labor capacity.

That is where the economics start to change.

Not from replacing paper with digital tags.
From using ESLs to strengthen the operating model behind labor, pricing accuracy, and margin protection.

Justin Lockefeer, Vice President of Domestic and International Sales at IW Technologies, breaks down how grocery operations leaders should think about ESL ROI and why usage depth matters more than the label itself.

Not hype. Not a pitch.

A practical look at labor, ex*****on, and payback from a grocery operations lens.

If ESLs are part of your 2026 planning, this is the right way to pressure-test the business case.

Link in comments below.