Whole Food Market Inc. will gradually phase out the use of plastic grocery bags in its 270 stores with the goal of no longer using them by April 22, which is Earth Day.

The Austin, Texas-based grocery chain, which has four Triangle locations, said it will encourage shoppers to bring their own reusable bags and will offer 100 percent recycled paper grocery bags when needed.

“More and more cities and countries are beginning to place serious restrictions on single-use plastic shopping bags since they don’t break down in our landfills, can harm nature by clogging waterways and endangering wildlife, and litter our roadsides,” A.C.

Gallo, co-president and chief operating officer for Whole Foods Market, said in a statement

Overall, Vester is to open three new hypermarkets in Ukraine by the end of 2008, Interfax reported. Vester Hyper outlets will appear in Khmelnitsky, Kharkov and Severodonetsk. The store in Khmelnitsky will be opened in Q3 2008 on an area of over 4,500 m2. The investments in this outlet will exceed $3.2m.

In addition, this year Vester is to start projects on the opening of hypermarkets in Borispol and Sevastopol, Interfax reported. Overall, the company aims to invest some $41m in the launch of 13 outlets, jointly covering over 45,000 m2 in Kharkov, Mariupol, Sevastopol, Khmelnitsky as well as in Lvov and Dnipropetrovsk Provinces. By 2011 Vester is to open 50 hypermarkets and 24 supermarkets, taking up 307,000 m2 in 35 Ukrainian cities. Currently, Vester operates a chain of 52 outlets in Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Belarus.

The facility is complete with shopping carts, aisles stocked with goods, and Altierre’s flagship product—a wireless LAN based on a system of RF tags, LCD displays, servers, access points and wireless stations, which controls and updates prices for each item.

Replacing the low-tech paper display tags used by grocery stores to display prices and marketing messages with electronic shelf labels may seem at first glance like an unnecessary—and expensive—application of technology. But Altierre executives say supermarkets and other large retail operations invest thousands of man hours in the inefficient process of manually replacing paper tags on store shelves to reflect updated prices. Using Altierre’s platform, a supermarket employee can update prices throughout the store in a matter of minutes with a few keystrokes, according Sunit Saxena, the company’s chairman and CEO. He argues that the system saves time and labor costs, reduces human error and is “green,” saving billions of sheets of paper each year. Altierre has a shopping cart in the demo room overflowing with paper price tags, a compelling visual that attests to the amount of paper that can be saved in a single supermarket.

The system also brings a whole new potential for marketing advantages, according to Saxena. Pushing a shopping cart through the demo room, he notes that potential for a readout mounted on the cart which could display advertisements, alerts about what items are on sale or nutritional information about products in the immediate vicinity of a shopper’s current location.

“People today are so pressed for time,” Saxena says. “They are rushing through the store to pick up a few things for dinner on their way home for work. The system could give them the information they need to allow them to get in and out faster.”

With the ability to dynamically change pricing and sale information tags much more quickly, supermarkets could also run different specials on products in a store at different times of the day, enabling them to appeal to target demographics, according to Saxena. In the middle of the day on weekdays, when more senior citizens tend to shop, stores could run specials on items they tend to buy for a few hours, he notes as an example.

Altierre says it has been co-developing its wireless dynamic pricing solution under signed agreements with several of the top 10 grocery chains in the U.S., reportedly including Safeway Inc. Altierre has raised a total of $60 million in venture funding, including an $8 million Series C round last May that included the D. E. Shaw group and Labrador Ventures.

Saxena boasts more than 27 years of experience, much of it in the semiconductor industry, including high-level executive positions at Alliance Semiconductor and Sandcraft Inc. He co-founded Altierre in 2003 with veteran software engineer Anurag Goel, now Altierre’s chief technology officer and vice president of software development. But Saxena says the two men conceived of the idea years before.

Initially, the two men sought to purchase the hardware needed to implement their plan from third parties. But they quickly realized that the type of high-reliability, low-power, low-cost chips they required were not available as an off-the-shelf solution.

“We realized pretty quickly that we were going to have to make everything from scratch,” Saxena says.

So, tapping into his experience in the semiconductor industry, Saxena put together a design team to create Altierre’s own communications controller and display driver chips. Both devices are implemented in 0.18 micron CMOS with operating voltage of 3V and clock frequencies of less than 1 Mhz.

The chips were designed to require a minimum number of external components, resulting in lower bill-of-materials cost and smaller board area, according to Altierre. Using a mature process technology also saved costs and offered higher yield, the company said.

With a goal of five-year battery life for the devices powering dot matrix LCD display screens, the Altierre team applied power-saving criteria at all hierarchies of the design, including clock gating, dynamic voltage switching, dynamic frequency scaling, low-power SRAM compiler, low-voltage operation and low power standard cells, according to the companies. Clock frequencies were intentionally kept as low as possible, and Altierre uses a proprietary LCD addressing scheme that consumes very low power.

Saxena says the past five years for Altierre have involved a “steep learning curve and a lot of water under the bridge.” But, he says, the company is now poised to capitalize on the technology it has developed. It estimates that the potential market for supermarket chains alone could be worth $10 billion, and the company believes it will eventually garner interest from other verticals. Down the road, it plans to migrate its chips to 0.13 micron technology.

No SUV-driving American shopper would be surprised to find 20 lb. sacks of dog chow at a Wal-Mart supercenter. But at an urban minimart that is trying to attract bag-toting pedestrians? Not so much.

Wal-Mart is struggling to expand with small stores as it seeks to penetrate big cities and jumpstart its U.S. growth. It has rolled out only a handful of Wal-Mart Express locations, and their merchandise shows a lack of adaptation from the Supercenter formula, as Shelly Banjo explains on Lunch Break.

Unless that minimart is operated by Wal-Mart Stores Inc. The Bentonville, Ark., retailer is betting that small urban stores called Walmart Express could eventually help jump-start its growth in the U.S. and fight off competition from rapidly expanding dollar-store chains.

The heavy bags of Ol’ Roy dog food suggest Wal-Mart is struggling to think outside the supercenters that remain its focus, analysts say. The world’s largest retailer has rolled out fewer than a dozen Wal-Mart Express locations since it launched the first 15,000 square-foot store a year ago, and experts say its effort to offer supercenter pricing and assortment in small, high-cost spaces is putting pressure on the minimarts’ profitability.

Wal-Mart declined to comment ahead of its quarterly earnings report on Thursday. But in a March analysts’ conference, finance chief Charles Holley said the company didn’t have enough results to open thousands of small-format stores. The venture, he emphasized, was still “a pilot.”

He described the company as moving slowly on purpose, citing a similar, 13-year effort to make its Neighborhood Markets profitable; the company has opened 199 of the grocery stores since 1998 and plans to open 80 this year. Analysts polled by Thomson Reuters project a fiscal first-quarter profit of $1.04 a share on revenue of $110.5 billion; a year earlier, Wal-Mart reported earnings of 97 cents and $104 billion of revenue. The company’s stores open at least a year are expected to report a third-consecutive quarter of modest growth.

Double-digit sales gains overseas have been a big driver of results in recent years. Investors are eager to see Wal-Mart develop a strategy for accelerating its U.S. growth.

The company wants to do the same in the U.S. At Wal-Mart’s annual meeting last June, U.S. stores chief Bill Simon said he would like the Express Stores “to deliver the same experience that a supercenter can deliver, only in 15,000 square feet.”

Problem is Wal-Mart has taken that statement quite literally, said Leon Nicholas of the consulting firm Kantar Retail.

“Wal-Mart can’t pull itself away from a supercenter mind-set,” he said. “Just look at the shelves. It is just absurd to see a dozen kinds of jelly or peanut butter when a shopper just wants to get in and out of the store quickly.”

Prices of items such as Skippy peanut butter and Kellogg’s cornflakes at a Wal-Mart Express store near Fayetteville, Ark. were identical to those at a nearby Wal-Mart supercenter, according to a recent Kantar study. The same buyers select goods for the Express stores as the supercenters.

Some customers like it. Rhonda Wright, 43, filled a plastic basket with items including cocoa butter skin lotion at a Wal-Mart Express in Chicago last week. A bank teller who lives about 15 minutes from the store, Ms. Wright said found it quicker “and a little easier to find things” than at a supercenter.

Some analysts question why Wal-Mart isn’t moving faster and why it has added or remodeled more than 120 supercenters last fiscal year, while other big-box retailers, including Best Buy Co., Staples Inc. and Barnes & Noble Inc. shutter dozens of stores.

“Wal-Mart is the only retailer out there continuing to open up big box stores, which leads me to think they’re not paying enough attention to what the consumer needs,” said Charles Grom, an analyst at Deutsche Bank who has a sell rating on Wal-Mart. “Eleven Express stores is a drop in the bucket.”

—Owen Fletcher contributed to this article.

Write to Shelly Banjo at shelly.banjo@wsj.com

A version of this article appeared May 17, 2012, on page B2 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Can Wal-Mart Think Small?.