Put A Tag On It

The pricing gun: Where the hell did it come from?

It turns out that searching for something called a “pricing gun” is kind of tough to do. As our search engines have declined, anything with the word “gun” on it is suspect, even if it’s for something fairly innocuous.

But the pricing gun is nonetheless an excellent example of a device that has helped millions of people identify shifting prices, yet is only truly used in one context: Retail. You can clearly see the roots of where it came from by taking separate, unrelated ideas and combining them. You can look at things like combination locks, typewriters, and rubber stamps, and see how they were combined in novel ways to produce an iconic piece of supermarket kit.

In many ways, the pricing gun, which at its root takes a sticker with self-stick adhesive, prints a price on it, and tags it on a product, is a synthesis of multiple ideas that, together, created something new. We talked about one, self-stick adhesive (terrible name upon its initial release BTW), six years ago. Great innovation by the adhesive giant now known as Avery Dennison, but not one that was designed to scale. Imagine putting a label on every single product in a grocery store, by hand, writing the prices out, cutting the stickers, and so on. It would be the definition of Tedium.

But there were other lanes for price labeling that were already starting to emerge. Consider the printing process, for example, which essentially involved pressing metal or rubberized content onto ink, then taking the ink-stained surface and pressing it onto a sheet of paper. These were once parts of giant machines, but they could also be made handheld or somewhat more portable. The first commercial typewriter, the Hansen Writing Ball, feels like it could’ve been used for price tags if put in a slightly different context. All of this fed into the idea of the handheld “rubber stamp,” which gradually gained a “self-inking” capability, which meant that you didn’t even need an inkwell to dip them in.

Meanwhile, innovations in the combination lock during the 1870s began to bleed to similar tools. If you make the numbers on a combination lock lean outward rather than inward, the wheels could be used not unlike a printing press. So you can see where this is going!

All of this led to the Bates Automatic Numbering Machine, a press-down device Edwin G. Bates patented around 1901. While intended for checks and similar documents, the approach is fairly similar to how a price tagger works. You set the number, you press down on the page, and then it goes to the next number for the next page. This device helped to reshape the legal industry in particular, as pages could now easily be numbered, and became known enough that “Bates numbering” became a common business-world shorthand. In fact, some later versions of the device could keep the same number for multiple stamps.

This was clearly the path that led to adjustable price tagging, though other inventors took the helm. At the turn of the 20th century, Frederick Kohnle of the Automatic Pin Ticketing Machine Company effectively brought this process to price tags of the kind that might be attached to clothing, rather than to stickers. (It wasn’t quite handheld, but you can see the DNA bleed through.)

Another inventor working in the same area, William G. Metcalf, developed a pricing ticket machine, and as The Price Gun Store notes, the patents ultimately came under Kohnle’s ownership.

Kohnle has a lot of patent filings to his name around pricing tagging technology, so while he didn’t necessarily create the pricing gun, he likely created the environment that led to its eventual creation. His innovations live through to the modern day in another company he founded, Monarch Tag and Label—which is, of course, now owned by Avery Dennison and specializes in pricing guns.

Monarch, which also spent time as a subsidiary of Pitney Bowes, developed one of the most important direct predecessors to the modern pricing gun, the “Dial-A-Pricer,” in the 1950s. But it wasn’t the only one. As the 2023 book Fixing Prices: A Century of Setting, Posting and Adjusting Retail Prices notes, a number of related solutions started to emerge around the same period, most notably the Garvey price stamper, invented by Ed Garvey in the 1950s.

What’s interesting is that Google Patents appears to have a full-on example of a pricing gun patent filed in the 1940s, predating Monarch’s own gun-shaped attempts. But there’s no evidence that the device, developed by Robert S. Kafka for the Midland Equipment Corp., ever meaningfully made it to market—literally no information about the invention, beyond a defunct-company listing in the Robert D. Fisher Manual of Valuable and Worthless Securities, exists beyond the patent. Other companies eventually developed their own versions, including Monarch and Garvey, along with the Japanese company SATO.

But Kafka’s innovation is definitely worth our time, as it diagnoses the problem thoughtfully:

In stores, and particularly in stores where large numbers of articles are to be price-tagged, the labor of affixing the price tags is very great. For instance, if 1,000 glasses are to be labelled “$.39,” it is necessary to take a thousand labels, write, print, or type the price upon each one, after which the operator is required to separate the protective backing tape from the adhesive side of the label and apply the label to the glass. This entire operation is done by hand. The complexity of the operation is immeasurably increased by the number of articles that are to be labelled for sale and by the variety of prices at which the articles are to be sold.

It is an object of this invention to make a hand labeller which will print the proper price mark and apply a price label by adhesive to an article.

If you can label a thousand cans just by setting a price and hitting a button, you’ve turned a multi-hour process into something that can be done in a matter of minutes.

If Kafka didn’t commercialize his invention at a large scale, many other companies soon did. Fixing Prices co-authors Franck Cochoy, Johan Hagberg, and Hans Kjellberg credit Monarch for spreading the innovation far and wide:

However, the Monarch company did much more: it paved the way for rebalancing prices and qualities on item labels, reunifying the scattered languages of manufactured qualities (on product packaging) and retail prices (on store shelves), and thus reagencing product labeling in favor of the grocers. This development took several decades and relied on a number of innovations to come fully into fruition, along a complex process of qualitization, digitalization, and paperization of shelf labels.

Let’s think about what they wrote for a second: If grocers can label devices by the hundreds in a matter of minutes, that means they can raise or lower prices much more quickly than they could before. It’s not quite automation; someone has to put their mark on all those cans or pairs of pants. But you can put a price label on top of the other price label and all of a sudden a $2.00 can of food can jump in price to $2.99.

(Plus, it allowed retailers to put their mark on the products, literally. Old price tags, some of which can be seen on Flickr, are often seen as a great way of determining a sealed object’s age and vintage.)

In this light, the barcode, which was printed on the product by the manufacturer rather than the retailer, could be seen as a way to put the product seller back in charge of their MSRP destiny. But oddly, the relatively manual process of price tagging actually became something of a rallying cry for consumers and unions, rather than the retailers or manufacturers.

Which leads us to the 1970s, when retailers attempted to innovate past them.

How Michigan became ground zero for a price-tag debate

In the late ’90s, as I’ve written many times, I started my first job at a grocery store—and immediately came to hate the bottle machines. Those machines, which attempted to automate bottle deposit laws, were not unique to Michigan but emerged thanks to some unique quirks in state law.

But one thing I did not realize at the time was that Michigan law was also onerous in another way: With pricing. Thanks to state law, my grocery store had to have employees go around the stores and do nothing for hours but put price tags on tens of thousands of items. These items each had to be tagged individually, even though there was a price listing near the original spot on the shelf.

But it’s not like we had phones on us at all times when we could spot check the price, like we do now. So there was a certain logic to it, even if retailers did not like it.

The law, passed in 1976, came about despite the fact that the barcode had emerged at this time. And honestly, it emerged because of it, in part because of union concerns.

“There is an attempt being made to replace clearly marked prices on items with unintelligible lines that can only be deciphered by a computer,” said William C. Marshall, the president of the Michigan State AFL-CIO, in a 1976 wire story. “This would make comparison shopping in the supermarkets impossible and could become the greatest ripoff of consumers imaginable.”

(Other states passed laws too; Massachusetts actually had a “sticker law” on the books a year longer than Michigan did. And many states require shelf labels. But no states required stickers on quite so many things, quite as strictly, for quite as long.)

It’s not hard to see how this in practice helped to protect jobs while also protecting consumers. After all, if each individual item needed to be tagged, that meant someone needed to do the tagging. Any retailer that failed to tag its items was on the hook for an up to $25,000 fine. That was enough to bring in part-time reinforcements.

While pricing guns were quite fast and could tag a lot of prices in a short amount of time, it was still a lot of work that wouldn’t exist if not for this law.

Grocery stores, over the years, grew increasingly opposed to the law, in part because of that labor pressure, which, among other things, required repeated retagging of items as things went on sale or prices naturally increased.

“To individually price those items on a daily basis takes a tremendous amount of labor,” a D&W Food Centers spokesperson told the Grand Rapids Press in 1993.

(Granted, it was a lot less labor than before the pricing gun was a thing, but hey, let them be mad.)

In one wire story, the home improvement retailer Builders Square estimated that one-tenth of the total cost of its labor in the state went to price tagging, a cost of $2.4 million. It was a cost, one that came with added labor concerns, but not ones so significant to, say, ignore the Michigan market.

Despite periodic pressure from grocers, the law didn’t actually get removed from the books until Obama was the president, well after most other states got rid of similar laws. In fact, by the time it did, the pricing gun was more or less of a relic from another time, although one people still saw around from time to time.