Walmart digital price labels are coming to every store shelf in U.S. by end of 2026

"digital" price tags should be regulated like the digital billboards for gas stations, price can't be updated more than x a day and the price at the tag is what you pay.

Walmart PR:  We don't do "dynamic" or surge pricing and will not be using the electronic shelf tags for that purpose.   Walmart executive team:  We're totally doing dynamic surge pricing and running split tests on price and messing with customers to see just how much they'll pay and if they pay attention to price at all.  Shh!   =================== edit:  Yes, this is a productivity improvement and will save on printed labels and worker time.  Will Wally-World pass any of that on to shoppers?  Not likely.   It does make it easy and quick, even trivial,  to do dynamic and surge pricing (and, yes, clearance and sales too, to be fair).   Dynamic, surge pricing is NOT changing the price between when you pick it from the shelf and when you check out and pay.  It is change to the price on the shelf as frequently as practical to maximize profit.   more links and information in my next comment in reply to this one below...

Lot of people in here pointing out that they don't shop at Walmart anyway, which is fine and good. But understand that Walmart is the \*only\* grocery store for tons of people in more rural areas. They're gonna get gouged to hell

And here my Walmart still doesn't have tap to pay

My local Walmart has a few of these up in some sections of the store and so many of them are broken or will give an error showing no price. This includes those behind the glass so it isn't the customers breaking them. I'm not looking forward to these totally taking over the store.

Need to get a flipper device so I can reprogram these. *EDIT* people think this will change the price at check out. It will not. It will drive consumer trust in prices through the floor and THAT will piss off enough people that the stores will change back. You want a loop hole in life to change exploit it until it's fixed or too big of a hassle too keep.

They have money for this but no money to pay workers livable wages and healthcare.

Kohl's has been using digital tags for a long time. Has anyone ever observed dynamic price changes? I've never heard of it happening.

I use to work at Home Depot, Walgreens, and CVS. When I wasn't working the check out counter, the majority of my job was changing the prices on all the shelves. Sales would be weekly and entire shifts were pulling price tags and then place new ones on the right spots. Then fighting with customers when the sales tag was accidentally left up or put on the wrong item. It was a nightmare. I understand how being able to change prices at the press of a button might lead to dynamic pricing, but as a former employee I would f****** love that

And I’ll avoiding any store that has these. It’s a damn scam. it’s wild this is even legal.

They are "known as DSLs"

I work in Walmarts with an outside company. All of my stores in NJ switched to digital like 7-8 months ago and honestly the concerns over fast price changes happening multiple times daily is silly. I struggle to get a price updated for a client that's supposed to have been in the system weeks beforehand. They only mess with them when they do a big reset of a section, are adding in brand new products, or doing their rollback sales.

Having been in the label changing end loads of times, I absolutely love the idea in a benevolent world. But this is not a benevolent world.

I will bet my f****** car that Walmart is doing this in preparation for rolling out dynamic pricing. The one and only way that doesn't happen is if there's enough consumer backlash against the concept that they quietly shelve it and act like they were never planning to do it in the first place. Fat chance that's going to happen though. Get ready for things to get EVEN MORE expensive everyone!

Dynamic pricing for all! Remember when companies tried to gaslight us that this wasn't coming?

How many of you live under rocks? There are plenty of retailers that already use electronic tags and have for years at this point. It's to save on labor and resources. Prices change a lot (especially these days) and it's a tedious task having to replace paper tags.

I don’t understand the fear that they’ll change the price between choosing an item and checkout. Very unlikely they’d ever do this since it would just piss people off. There are already stores using these to change prices overnight because it reduces so much wasted time and expense printing new labels. I also don’t think they’ll dynamically price items on shelves based on the individual. There are simply too many people walking by the shelves to do that with any certainty. There’s often two or three people walking by the same shelf inside of thirty seconds, not to mention people who shop in groups like families. There’s just no way to do that kind of dynamic pricing in person at a store this size.

The payroll savings on implementing price changes will be tremendous. This will allso allow for near-instantaneous price increases when suppliers increase costs, instead of waiting days or weeks for stores to implement the changes (speaking from decades of experience). Also, the small price increases - less than a nickle say- were often not implemented because it cost more to physically print the price changes and physically change the shelf prices. This eliminates that roadblock. This is a very big advantage for Walmart since the upfront cost is going to be so large that few companies can match that investment. What about Price Decreases, you ask? hahahahahahahahaha.. Only if it becomes part of a marketing campaign to advertise a "new lower bigger badder" price image, which happens every 3-4 years.

40 years ago I worked a company developing electronic tags. It was a disaster. They kept failing and store managers would go insane. They just were before their time. The biggest problem was they had no redundancy built in and single points of failure ment they were always going down.

Just spitballing. Not at all involved with the deployment of such things or the profits that could be made while trying to keep what I believe to be my own pro human (read liberal if you want) ideas intact. Move those damn things. No company has managed to create a digital tag that cannot be displaced (they are trying). Take that tag showing the price of salad & move it. A tag was lost so now the store has a choice. Put another tag or print a physical version on paper. Digital tags are limited in every store & replacing them is not c****. Will add that underpaid employees are already done with replacing/updating/maintaining a piece of tech that is already a nightmare because profits.

We have these some of our big chain grocery stores in Sweden (mainly seen them in ICA). Maybe our country and consumer rights and regulations are different, but the introduction of these have not caused any price-fiddling due to high demand or such. Mainly it's just been a great way for the stores to make information about "low stock" or "delayed delivery" easier to get. It's honestly been kinda great for when an item is about to sell out and it has the information of "delayed delivery", so I buy one extra just in case. But, again, different countries, different things you can or can't get away with. In an "honest" system (it's still shitty and profiting off of inflation, but not doing what's being talked about in the comments) they're kinda neat.

Looks like I'm not buying anything at Wal-Mart anymore. Not that I really did...save for that one or two "bet they have it" trips a year.

And still no tap to pay.

This is the start of dynamic pricing.

All so they can implement surge pricing. It’s dumb af.

Here comes super-enhanced surge pricing!

Just trying to boil that frog. Walmart will 100% be charging different rates at different times, and to different people if able.

Everything is a scam now.

We've had them here for a couple years. They definitely have some advantages. Personal shoppers can make the tag for the item they're looking for flash blue, which makes finding the item much quicker. When sections in the store are reset, which Walmart does once or twice a year, the process of setting new price tags is much quicker. Price changes due to items going on or coming off of rollback is also much quicker. Price changes go into effect at 5 am when Walmart is closed, so it's not like they are going to change prices after you've grabbed an item and before you've made it to checkout. I don't think that any "dynamic pricing" will look the way that people expect. Could they raise the price of items on a nightly basis as they anticipate growing demand? Maybe. For example, swimsuit prices might go up overnight as weather warms up. They'll have to go back down as the weather cools down to sell off remaining merchandise though. It's foolish to think that retailers haven't been doing this for a hundred years. Everyone knows the best time to shop for winter clothing is Spring and the best time to shop for Summer clothing is Fall. You're not going to get a deal if you're shopping in-season clothes. Here's what everyone is forgetting though: Walmart and Amazon are constantly at war with each other on pricing. They both have tools to ensure that they're not getting beat on price. As long as Amazon is trying to beat Walmart on pricing, that provides downward pressure on prices across the whole market. Walmart has also spent untold amounts of advertising/PR money to convince Americans that they are the lowest cost place to buy things. If they were to catch bad PR for actively changing prices while customers are shopping in store, imagine the damage it would do to their brand. That's especially true when everyone now has a social media soapbox to stand on and things like this would go viral in a heartbeat. Walmart is not stupid.

Here is a look inside the software source code: High income individual approaching. Initiate price surge on everything.  Desperate husband coming in from pregnant wife at home, initiate price surge on chocolate ice cream and oreos.  Low income hungry individual incoming, believe it or not, price surge. 

Are they all on some network? If not, how would they change the price before you buy it?

You can’t even get the same price online as in store unless you ask. I have my doubts all being the same.

This is a mistake. Half of them won't be working in the first few months.

You can still do dynamic pricing at the register off the bar code. The displayed prices at my Walmart are often different than what's in the system anyway.

Thankfully I have the option to shop elsewhere

Ah so buying groceries becomes like the stock market. Nice

“Boss there are 30% more luxury vehicles in the parking lot on Tuesdays, increase all prices .02% that day. What? Old Ms. Brown drives a rusty Honda Civic? Too damn bad for her… Oh and all those online shoppers that are just picking up outside, increase their app prices 5% pre d*******. What? Mr. Blue is severely disabled? Too damn bad for him…”

If they start this surge pricing, we'll all just have to form coops and buy groceries that way. Screw this.

Can we get an idealogical hacker, please?

Algorithmic pricing coming to a walmart near you.

Surge the pricing so hard that everyone buys from target and costco

Kohl’s has been using them for years, Best Buy too. Nothing new here.

cool, they'll dynamically add the sales tax to the price tag too, right? right?!

Yet another reason to not shop at Walmart

They'll put up millions of dollars for this but won't add a millions to payroll to have employees make actual living wages instead of the starvation snap wages.

As someone who used to work at a Walmart, I think this is gonna suck.

This has been the pattern with technology. Clearly it benefits corporations, NOT the consumer and it will get worse going forward especially with AI technology. Advances in technology now harm us more than benefit us. Consumers are getting screwed at so many levels. Technology is the newest tool to squeeze as much money from the working class as possible. Large corporations have massive weapons to use against us like deception/technology/fraud/confusion. In essence GREED on steroids!

I wonder how hackable these things are