Thanks for your relevant comment Matt, I find that the lessons learned by Stop & Shop/Giant would be valuable to assess and share with our community participants.

Among the accelerators - and enablers - to rapid, targeted promotion management and customer interaction we are also seeing in Europe a clear trend towards centralizing store systems- in other words moving from a distributed POS architecture which implies batch data sync overnight to a real-time POS system, where smart in-store devices&applications can be always connected to enterprise systems (think promo, price, loyalty/CRM, merchandising etc..), your online channel, inventory and DCs. Retailers in Europe have become pretty advanced in the way they can enable this real-time database for the entire enterprise while mitigating the risks that are typically associated with a centralized architecture. Are you seeing something similar happening in the US?

A final comment on your post for the sake of accuracy: Esselunga decided not to implement real-time promotions on their self-scanning devices at this stage, but they might do this in the near term. However, the self-scanning solution they are using (Datalogic) incorporates that ability.