Appeal No. 2004-1176 Page 5
Application No. 09/232,751
In some cases, special price-reduction is granted to selected customer categories, such
as students, senior citizens, frequent shoppers, military personnel, etc., which may be
indicated to the data processor system by a portable unit carried by the purchaser,
which unit interacts with the electronic shelf label to display the special price for the
category of purchaser (column 2, lines 1-7). The discounted prices offered to certain
categories of purchasers are included in the basic price information 112 stored in the
computer system and may also be further reduced according to the price-reduction
criteria 116 of the system, which includes, among other things, sales volume and
current inventory status, as discussed above.
Based on our review of Teicher, we conclude that, at best, Teicher would have
suggested use of operating environment conditions, such as sales volume and current
inventory, by servers in Williams’ system in determining which promotions to offer, that
is, the selection of products or services on which to offer coupons and the offering price
on said selected products. We find no suggestion in Teicher or Tso, however, to modify
Williams so as to select one or more target groups dependent on changes in operating
environment, as called for in claim 1. It follows that we cannot sustain the examiner’s
rejection of claim 1, or claims 2-4, 7-12, 14 and 15 depending therefrom, as being
unpatentable over Williams in view of Tso and Teicher.
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