Walmart's use of digital price tags signal the future of retail shopping, but consumers are worried

It's bound to happen. Why waste hours replacing tags when you can just change what the shelf says when the prices change.

But this article is so pro Walmart it's crazy.

Retailers argue that these innovations increase efficiency and reduce costs in an industry known for its slim profit margins.

Slim profit margins my ass. Walmarts gross profit for the twelve months ending July 31, 2024 was $163.786B,

I think the main concern is that this is a step towards normalizing extremely frequent price changes, a la Uber surge pricing.
- That’s exactly what this is. All stores will eventually do this and prices will fluctuate throughout the day.
- It’ll be exciting to see prices temporarily jump during the few hours the majority of working class folk have to do their shopping.
- And personalized pricing, based on your profile and what they think they can get you to pay.
- So, if I grab an item off the shelf and browse around the store for a while, is the price going to be the price currently displayed or the price when I grabbed it?
  If it's the current price, what's the point of a price tag? If I can't actually know the price until checkout, then showing me the price is kind of a useless bit of data. I also suspect that the "speak to a manager" types would make that a major headache for stores.
  If it's the price when I grabbed it, how are they keeping track of that? I see two ways of handling that: one requires that you use their app to shop, and the other requires cameras and "machine vision" that are still unreliable, at best. The former seems more likely, but I doubt either is going to sit well with customers.
  Edit: someone pointed out that it might not actually display a price, and you'd have to scan it to get your price. Kind of like the first option, but I think it's going to turn off less tech savvy customers.
  I haven't seen that aspect addressed in any articles about the "feature".
- I edited in another thought. I agree with that fear, that's obviously the concern. I didn't feel the need to repeat it.
- It will become an Olympic event where you have to get from the shelf to the till before the price changes!
Slim profit margins my ass. Walmarts gross profit for the twelve months ending July 31, 2024 was $163.786B,
Not to sound flippant, but do you know what gross profit means? They aren't pocketing all of that. Walmart's net profit margin is 2.66%, which is minuscule. They make up for that by having enormous volume.
- A measly $3.2b. Can hardly afford a new yacht with that!
- That's an expected tradeoff of operating an essential service is the point. It's not as though their margin is that slim by mistake, or out of goodwill, or bad business sense. It's meant to lead to the situation where we shop at Walmart not by choice, but in lieu of other options.
- You made a good point and I immediately thought that reporting a gross profit dollar amount as an example of how profit margins are not slim as simply inappropriate. And I would have responded myself if you hadn't. There's no single dollar figure that can inform anyone about anything useful about the profit margin of a business. A number without context is useless.
- Gross profit can be defined as the profit a company makes after deducting the variable costs directly associated with making and selling its products or providing its services.
  Flippant away
Slim profit margins my ass. Walmarts gross profit for the twelve months ending July 31, 2024 was $163.786B,
Walmart has 10.5k locations. 163B divided by 10.5K is about $15.6M per location.
Jesus, in what world is $15M profits per store location considered a "slim margin"?
- "Gross profit" is a meaningless number in this context. Their net income was $15.5B. If you do the same math to try to determine profit per location, ($15.5B/10500) it's about $1.48M. Not bad, but still about 90% lower than your estimate.
  Since I was already estimating seemingly random profit ratios, I also looked at their profit per employee, which came out to $7380/person ($15.5B/2.1M employees).
  Unfortunately these numbers are also inclusive of, for example, Walmart's e-commerce program, so calculating the profit per location doesn't indicate anything meaningful to me, though I'm morbidly curious about what insights you are hoping to get from it?

Work in retail without e-ink and a lot of the concerns people have here already happen with paper. We do full store paper price tag updates daily, also someone will go around with a scanner making sure prices are up to date with website and print new sheets if not.

Normal days will consist of 3-5 new batches of tickets with the full store update batch containing normally ~10-20 a4 sheets. This isn't a huge store either I imagine most wallmarts would have more products.

The prices already update super frequently and e-inks don't really change that. It basically just cuts out the printing and placing, the person running around with the scanner now updates prices.

I think for workers they are nice as they reduce the chance of paper cuts and the back and leg pain from changing the 100s of bottom shelf tags.

The benefit for stores is they likely don't need to hire as many people, less training and possibly reduced material cost over time as the paper would probably add up.

I'm not worried about e-ink price tags. Aldi has them. I'm worry if it says, use your phone to find special offers only for you.

AFAIK, they use RFID now so they must be changed manually but maybe someday, they will devise a price-gouging scheme involving face detection and tracking people with security cameras.

"Here comes this lady that always buys four cans of dog food despite the last price increase! Let's notch it up it by another 20%!"

No they are wifi controlled
- They are also IR controlled. A lot of them have a little window on the front of the unit, and an array of transmitters in the ceiling.
- In the Czech Republic, BILLA uses them and they respond to the RFID reader on my phone. It's a different kind though, most have black-white-red displays.

Rightfully worried IMO

Haven't digital price tags been used for decades? I'm sure these will be more high tech, but I remember ones like this at least 20 years ago

Yeah these have existed for a while.
I think the only thing new is that walmart previously talked about actually implementing "on demand pricing" and now that they're adding digital price tags they could actually do it.
- I think this will be potentially be a good thing (at first) as you won't have people wasting their life away just endlessly walking around the store updating the price of every individual item for 40 hours a week.
  Things will get messy when they start price gouging based on current inventory, weather, holidays or emergency situations.
  Things will get deeply dystopian if they start scanning customers as they enter and change the price based on their skin color, gender, clothing, or estimated net worth.

Can't wait for somebody to hack them, the displays are certainly neat. Especially if they manage to add it to an existing Home Automation network without extra hardware.

https://youtu.be/JOIp4s4YNEs

I guess we'll have to take photos of every item we pick from the shelves, so if the register attempts to charge more, or somehow misses a sale, we will have to get our phones out and say hey this was the price when i picked it. Great. Fantastic. Precisely the sort of simplicity and ease to be expected of advanced technology.

Someone will have to start a website to track item prices so we can work out when the cheapest time to buy something is.
I’m store item prices will be the next gas prices.
- and if they pull and rfid off your phone, or a bluetooth/wifi ping to of the apps you have running in the background like the walmart app, and are pricing per individual, it won't matter what time you go to shop, your price is gonna be your price whenever you show up

It's not just Walmart - the entire grocery sector is doing it. The potential for abuse is certainly not low.

The new labels allow employees to change prices as often as every ten seconds. - NPR

this gets into what if the price changes between pikcing it up and purchasing. They should really guarantee to not change prices while the store is open and find an hour to close and make 24hour stores 23 hours.
- As noted in other comments, that certainly happens now even with paper tags - but it makes that wheel just a bit more greased...
  It's understandable given the effort required to update tags manually, but it would be nice to see price guarantees from stores ("price stable for 24 hours!").
- Paper tickets at work but change frequently. Had this happen a couple times. Since its manual we normally ask if someone updated the isle. I've had to respond a few times and had the ticket in my pocket still.
  If there is major doubt though register price will be used, it's not hard for someone to lie or move a ticket.
  Oh also iirc there is a way to check price history to see if someone is lying so that can be used too if the store has that in the system.
  Best thing for any store is to take a photo tbh since its not just eink.
  I don't really agree with this but its the way it is.
It would be a crying shame if someone were to figure out a way to force those e ink displays to refresh fast enough that it kills the batteries on those things...
It’s America, so the answer is probably “No”.
Do you not have consumer protection laws?
We’ve had digital price tags for decades. But you couldn’t do this in NZ. Stores are obligated to sell you a product at the price they advertise it for AND have a reasonable quantity of units at that price… you couldn’t sell 1 TV for $1.
So these systems would need to track what price you saw it at.
(Caveat: Our stores are still cunts and have been found to overcharge people)

Obviously the way to combat this is to organize dozens or more people who just walk around, load up shopping carts, then leave the store without buying anything. They can pay people to put everything back.

As long as they are still sending out flyers with stuff you buy you are okay. Also, if you already knew the price range of your regularly shopped goods, you know something is off. Superstore is already using digital tags. And you can just pull out your phone and take pictures.

Lastly, it should be put into law so you can't increase price during the day. Going down is fine, but no going down and then going up again for peak hour. Stores can set whatever price they want to sell before opening. (for those non-regulated things)

New Jersey has a law like that for gas. Can only increase the price one time per day. But ut doesn't apply to all gass stations, just ones on the highway rest areas.

If they used a screen for the price tag on the display: Cool.

If I have to look it up on my own device: Fuck that.

"oh here comes kolanaki, he buys a lot of wee wee pads for his wolfdog, we can tell because we just pinged his phone and smartwatch, let's up the price by 30%, our records for the last 5 years, indicate he's running out of wee wee pads right now, and our outside data collectors have told us he never buys them anywhere else, and should pay the premium"

@Powderhorn These have been the norm in my country already for quite a while FWIW, haven't tested if they change these prices often or not however.

Yet. Infrastructure on this scale moves slowly and the transparentness of pricing changes on short time lines in physical stores is hard to track. It exists in emergency economies - we call it price gouging - but that's usually quite obvious. The idea of dynamic pricing has existed forever - hotels, airline flights, movie tickets, taxi rides, even electric rates. As technology advances it offers the opportunity to use the technology to shorten the time window for pricing changes more and more. An extra two tenths of a percent profit seems like a trivial amount. Amazon and Walmart combined for more than a trillion dollars in sales last year. 0.2% is a very non-trivial $2 Billion. If it becomes available, it will be exploited.

I’m pretty sure this was in the book of revelations.