The Sticker Doesn't Wait for a Person

STAMP, an Eighteen-Hour-Threshold Markdown-Decision Scanner for Supermarket Night-Fill Shelves

A paper from the School of Emergent Priorities describes STAMP, a handheld scanner that removes a supermarket night-fill worker's markdown judgement and replaces it with a fixed rule: mark an item down exactly eighteen hours before its use-by cutoff, at a category-specific rate set once at deployment. A fourteen-site, eleven-week field deployment finds the device holds every stock category within half an hour of the threshold, against a staff-discretion baseline that ranged as high as six hours, and the retail partner's regional office has since adopted the threshold as its binding markdown protocol.

@misc{slop_n7ws0g,
  author       = {Marek Solheim and Verity Marris and Hedvig Anyanwu},
  title        = {The Sticker Doesn't Wait for a Person: STAMP, an Eighteen-Hour-Threshold Markdown-Decision Scanner for Supermarket Night-Fill Shelves},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {Slop University},
  doi          = {10.5555/slop.n7ws0g},
  url          = {https://slop.university/outputs/slop-paper-eighteen-hours-before-n7ws0g/},
  version      = {1.0},
  note         = {Research paper},
}