The invention of the price gun marked a step forward in retail efficiency by enabling store personnel to quickly and accurately price merchandise.
The improvement in price transparency instilled confidence in shoppers and simplified the checkout process for cashiers.
The price gun was invented in 1935 by Ray Stanton “Stan” Avery who worked as a retail clerk in Los Angeles. Avery assembled some used machine parts to create and patent the first self-adhesive, die-cut labeling machine. The device would come to be known as a ‘price gun’ because of its appearance and the manner in which it allowed users to rapidly affix pricing labels to individual products.
Shortly after developing his innovative product, Avery created a company to produce self-adhesive labels, which he began supplying to the Dennison Manufacturing Company. After more than half a century of working together, the two firms merged to form Avery Dennison in 1990.
By the time of their merger, the price gun was seldom seen in retail operations. Its usage had been greatly diminished by the development of the barcode and point-of-sale scanning systems. The barcode eliminated retailers’ need to apply price labels to individual items in all but a handful of special situations where regulations required continued use of the practice as a form of consumer protection, designed to ensure accuracy with shelf edge prices.
Contribution to Retail History
‘The price gun was a major technological step forward for the retail industry though the mid-1990s until the development of intelligent bar coding scanning systems. It simplified operations for retailers of fast-turning consumer packaged goods and instilled trust in shoppers by improving price transparency and accuracy. The price gun improved retail operations efficiency for pricing, coding and inventory tracking and it enabled retailers to establish a new and improved in-store experience for shoppers.