Adams Building Supply Eliminiated 7,000 Paper Price Tags and Never Looked Back

Jamie Adams remembers the summer paper price tags lost the race. 

It was 2023. Adams Building Supply had just opened a new 10,000-square-foot store in Woodstock, Ontario, and post-pandemic inflation was still cresting. Orgill, the company's hardware supplier, sent a weekly file packed with price updates. Paper couldn't keep pace. 

"The amount of price inflation was absolutely insane and you couldn't keep up with it," Adams said. "We would have had to have somebody on the floor full time all week just changing shelf labels." 

He added: “We launched with the labels the day we opened the store in Woodstock due to our experience in 2021-2022 at our previous location with price inflation during the pandemic. We were set on finding an easier way to update shelf labels after that experience." 

Nobody had that kind of time, so shelves kept showing yesterday's prices.

Adams Building Supply runs three stores in southern Ontario. The flagship sits in Woodstock, where the business started and where Adams works. A small store in Shakespeare serves mostly contractors, and a store in Thorold, in the Niagara region, joined the company in March. 

Contractors drive about 85% of sales. The Woodstock and Niagara stores still draw plenty of walk-in shoppers, and Woodstock alone carries roughly 7,000 hardware SKUs. 

That's a lot of price tags.

Adams installed electronic shelf labels (ESLs) the day the new Woodstock store opened. The store now runs between 6,500 and 7,000 of them. On a paper system, each of those tags would need a human hand every time a price moved. 

In Canada, a mismatch costs real money. Many retailers follow the Scanner Price Accuracy Code, and under it, a shopper who gets overcharged at the register on an item under $10 walks out with it free, while pricier items come off $10. Adams said the old paper tags triggered that kind of mismatch "all the time."  

"With ESLs, that's a thing in the past," he said. "They update instantaneously." 

Through collaboration with Spruce product leadership, a direct integration was developed, and Adams played an important role as one of the first beta customers to help validate the solution. The weekly Orgill price file now flows into Spruce and out to the shelf with nobody touching a tag. 

The hours come back 

Adams figures the labels spare one employee two to three hours a day of walking aisles and policing tags. If he tried to run today's store on paper and price stickers, he puts the cost at 20 to 30 hours a week. 

The damage from the wrong tag doesn't stop in the aisle. A customer argues the price at checkout, and a supervisor has to come over and approve an override. "It all begins to add up," Adams said. 

Those hours now go to customer service, which Adams calls "how we stay in business."

The Woodstock labels also show on-hand inventory, and that small number changes how people shop. 

One morning a customer came in for shop towels and asked whether the store had a full box. The label said yes. Staff tracked it down, and he left with a box instead of a single roll. 

The number helps employees too. Woodstock keeps overstock above each section, and a student restocking an empty peg doesn't always look up. Before ESLs, that blind spot meant duplicate orders. Now the label tells staff more units sit somewhere nearby, and if nobody can find them, the team knows to cycle count that section.

Promotions used to mean printing a stack of sale tags and pulling them all again afterward. A one-day event wasn't worth the trouble. 

Now Adams can walk in, decide a section goes on sale, and watch every label flip at once. On a Milwaukee tool day, staff line up tools on a table with an ESL beside each one. The next morning, prices revert on their own. 

With paper, he said, "You can't do a one-day sale because this is not worth the extra work and hassle."

Adams says the store has barely scratched the surface. The labels can flash, so a new hire putting away a box of look-alike fasteners could scan it and watch the right spot light up. Down the road, he pictures customers building a shopping list on their phone and tapping a button to make the matching label blink. 

The Thorold store sits at the top of the list for the next rollout. With lower customer traffic than other locations, the Shakespeare store will likely not adopt ESLs. 

Setup doesn't scare Adams . His team links products to the point-of-sale system with a handheld scanner that looks like a cellphone. Installers need a day or two to mount the infrared equipment on the ceiling, and a store can run on labels within a couple of weeks to a month once that infrastructure goes in.

For dealers evaluating whether Electronic Shelf Labels (ESLs) are worth the investment, the real question is not the cost of the technology, but the value it creates. Adams Building Supply expects its ESL system to pay for itself in about two years and remain in service for roughly 20. 

 The investment helps protect margins through faster pricing updates and frees employees from time-consuming manual label changes. As Adams puts it, "A lot of people don't feel like changing a sticker is a meaningful job, and I would agree. I have better things for that person to do."  

For Adams, ESLs aren't just about digital labels, they're about improving efficiency, responding faster to market changes, and allowing employees to focus on work that adds greater value to the business.