Key Points
Walmart is rolling out digital shelf labels and expects the technology to be in all U.S. stores by year’s end. Kroger also has begun experimenting with the technology.
The nation’s largest retailer says the digital price tags help associates do their jobs better and stresses that prices on items will be exactly the same for every consumer in every store.
Some legislators are wary of the technology’s potential to be used in dynamic pricing models that disadvantage consumers, with Sens. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) and Ben Ray Luján (D-N.M.) introducing a bill to ban it.
people still shop at Walmart?
Stores are going to be aisles of vending machines where you pay as you go soon.
i don’t patronize them any more. one of several… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RXmnBbUjsPs "The film exposes Wal-Mart’s unscrupulous business practices through interviews with former employees, small business owners, and footage of Walmart executives. "
Pros: I heard on the Hackaday podcast where these discarded digital price things were (somewhat simply?) hacked to make fun hacker convention badges. So that’s neat. :D
2 inch networked e ink looking signage?
I want to play with a couple.
Found the article if you’re interested! :D
I completely understand the retailer’s desire for electronic shelf tags, and it doesn’t have to be nefarious of the store taking advantage of customers.
Way back in my youth when I worked retail, keeping shelf tags up-to-date was multiple-peoples full time jobs. This is was for a whole bunch of reasons.
The obvious:
- prices go up
- prices go down
The not so obvious:
- new products come in that don’t have an existing tag so one needs to be created
- products are out-of-stock and will not be replenished, so someone has to go to that shelf and pull that tag off
- promotions have some stock moved from its normal shelf location to an end cap or otherwise special display in a store so more tags needed for the same amount of product
- shelf space being utilized differently such as more product being oriented vertically where before it was horizontal so more tags needed for the same product
- patrons steal shelf tags (who knows why), but it means a new tag must be printed and deployed to the shelf
What’s more, if a shelf tag isn’t updated and the price rings up higher at the register, many retailers will honor the shelf tag listed price so there is a financial loss to the store from poorly maintained shelf tags. I am not surprised at all that it is cheaper for the retailer to buy and implement an entire electronic shelf tag solution over paper tags and labor.
There is legal obligation to honor the shelf tag if it says a product should be lower than what it rang up for. Otherwise it’s essentially a bait and switch, and can usually get a store in trouble if a customer complains to the right people.
There is legal obligation to honor the shelf tag if it says a product should be lower than what it rang up for.
At the federal level (in the USA at least), there isn’t. Some states might, no law covering the entire nation.
Otherwise it’s essentially a bait and switch, and can usually get a store in trouble if a customer complains to the right people.
The legal barrier for “bait and switch” is higher than that. Bait and switch is if the price is intentionally lowered and advertised, then raised or not offered when the customer tries to buy. If a customer took one of these “expired shelf tag” situations to court, the retailer could easily point to their sale promo from the week before showing the price was valid at that time, but that the old shelf tag hadn’t been properly taken down. The retailer would win, but the retailer knows this too and the cost of legal representation, bad press, and losing a customer usually isn’t worth winning the legal argument, so they usually just honor the mistakenly lower price and move on.
In China especially the Hema stores have had these for years. Nothing new there.
It makes good business sense to do this, especially in a huge store like Walmart, with thousands of SKUs. It will be faster and more accurate, and you might even get to fire a few people. That’s always fun.
The problem is that Walmart does everything in bad faith, so you just know they are going to use it for surge pricing. Get ready to see things like beer prices going up on the weekends.
Yup, next to no chance this doesn’t get used to set flux pricing unless we make laws to counteract it. Businesses have shown us repeatedly they only have the ethics we force on them.
Our food prices will be like the stock market.
People love blaming grocery stores for the price of goods, while ignoring the QE and 8% annual money supply growth that is actually debasing their salary.
Walmarts margins are ass, its a boomer consumer staple investment with a low volatility that can withstand a recession, its not Google with its 33% profit margin.
If we had limited money supply growth your employer would need to cut your salary every year for your cost of living adjustment, and you’d see your purchasing power automatically rising every year.
Walmarts margins are ass,
It’s literally a trillion-dollar company.
Why do you deep-throat capitalism so?
There are far more trillions in bonds, doesn’t make them high yield investments. Its reality, their margins are less than 4%, so how much can prices fall?
Oh no, not less than 4%, that makes it all alright, because economies of scale for a trillion-dollar company definitely don’t make 4% a figure anyone could even think about protesting against.
Nooo, Walmart is practically socialist, because the profit margins are single percentages. That’s definitely how this works.
Well if you think its Walmart making people poor you’re mistaken I would say, its QE that really erodes your paycheck. The CPI then does hedonic adjustments and substitutions to mismeasure real inflation to make it seem like you’re not getting poorer.
They’re not the only one to blame, no.
The system is propped up by everyone simultaneously. Especially when there’s people like you defending giant corporations like Walmart.
Also I’m not American
If the money supply grows at 8% a year and productivity barely rises that’s just raw debasement in my view, and complaining about an unchanging <4% margin of a consumer staple mainly owner by retired boomers is silly IMO.
According to research everyone should be buying levered positions and staying 100% global equities for life, as an inflation hedge is so important in the casino we call a global economy.
Because that’s how economies of scale work; you say a bigger number happens in another process, which implies that 4% profits are actually 4% socialist.
#/S
Man, I really didn’t think you were going for the “Walmart is actually socialist” - bit, I thought it’s beyond exaggerated comedy for me to even suggest you’d be dumb enough to argue that… yet here we are. Lol.
You’re comparing two completely different things; profitability per dollar vs. absolute growth of business.
Yeah, about that… https://youtu.be/odhVF_xLIQA
Oh Jesus, that was a pretty good watch.
TL;DW
Pepsi was caught price fixing for Walmart, specifically to make sure that no other store in the geographic area of a Walmart could buy Pepsi at a price where they could match Walmart.
Sure, they had to cheat just to eek out this margin:
Profitability:
Profit Margin 3.07%
Operating Margin (ttm) 4.57%
My point isn’t that Walmart isn’t a scumbag, just that prices won’t fall appreciably even if we did something about it. What’s debasing peoples standard of living is money supply growth, via QE largely.
I’ve been doing dynamic pricing in Walmart for years. I go in ready to pay for stuff but end up walking out with meat in my pants. The prices become free while I’m in the store
Is that steak in your pants…
If they won’t shift from a fraudulent Trickle Down Economy, to a proven Trickle Up Economy, then we’ll shift to a Robin Hood Economy.
Hands off independent, Mom & Pop businesses, in fact give them ALL your business, but for major corporations? Steal EVERYTHING!
Dynamic pricing is only part of it. When you are anticipating higher persistent inflation this makes it easier to tick prices up daily. Enjoy your Trump cost of living adjustments! Lol.
Plus the side effect of it is shrinkflaiton, and cheapflation. many items noticible made with cheaper ingredients turned out the product is crap.
Anything new in a Walmart is destroyed or disorganized within a day of its installation. It’s already impossible to find anything on the right shelf, and the jaded underpaid employees won’t do shit to fix it. Walmart is basically a junkyard with a roof.
Impossible to find anything at the right shelf? Can’t say I’ve ever found it impossible.
Don’t put that on the employees, get your “nobody wants to work anymore” attitude out of here.
Methinks thou doth project too much. Walmart is a shitty org who treats their employees like shit. I wouldn’t give a shit either if I had to work there.
Meh I knew someone who got a job there a couple years ago and they said they were enjoying it at the time. It may vary by area. I’ve certainly never had the issues you were discussing of not finding things where they were supposed to be or everything being a mess. I remember Kmart being that sloppy in the 90s sometimes though.
I go to Walmart about once a year and regret it every time.
Dynamic pricing is not legal in Canada, but what our Real Canadian Super Store does on some items is set the price super high, then every day you go in it is a different “sale” price. On a specific soymilk the price ranges from 3.50 to 9.00.
This kind of stuff is inevitable with capitalism, in their continuing effort to make human workers obsolete and save money it makes perfect sense to replace static paper displays with digital ones. I would assume the only reason they didn’t do it any soon is the up front costs.
Dynamic pricing is of course a real concern, but its not like you can’t do dynamic pricing with paper labels, it just takes more effort (and so the prices will probably reflect that as they change). It’s neat how we call it “dynamic pricing” now. but like when it happens in other places its called Hyperinflation, are there still some people foolish enough to think “dynamic” means it could go down also?
…what? How would dynamic pricing be done with paper labels? Have someone stand there, and switch out labels as new people approach?
It would be a shame if anyone went around the shelves with a car window breaker surreptitiously tapping on all of the price tags.
That would be kind of hilarious lmao
Come on people, use your fucking brain. Consumers are INCREDIBLY sensitive to retailers trying to change prices on the fly. My evidence: Every time this story is submitted, people come out of the WOODWORK yelling “If they try this, we’re up in arms!” Yes, no shit, they are firmly away.
So let’s walk through how it works: You’re shopping, you put items in your cart, you go to check out, and it is… :gasp: like 20% more than it should be! They changed the prices on the shelf while you were shopping!
As soon as anyone even mildly suspects a price difference, they are likely to 1) take pictures of prices when they take them off the shelf and compare to the prices they paid on checkout and 2) talk about it online, causing hundreds or thousands to say “I KNEW IT!!!” and do the same.
So even IF one store was to try this once, it would cause a SHIT TON of people takes measures that would easily catch it. And talk about the negative review cascade that would happen…
Stores may try to play games, sure. But they’re not gonna poke the bear like that. Even if they do, it will NOT go unnoticed. People WILL catch it easily.
So I am absolutely NOT worried about this happening, and all the energy people are wasting worrying about it could be better spent trying to convince people to stand up and take our oligarchs down and take back our country.
Or, sure, you can waste your fucking time masturbating to the idea of you standing up against the Corporate Masters and their Nefarious Price Changing.
So, sure. These tags get implemented where you shop, keep an eye out for them doing something stupid. But they almost certainly won’t.
It’s just like the people who - every thread fast food comes up - talk about how the Big Mac used to be bigger! Nope. 1:10 patties for decades. “But I have my own little pet conspiracy theory!” Okay, you do you, bub.
When I worked in retail I wished for digital tags. Would save so much money and the environment. Go check out your local Walgreens those fucking tags they changed every fucking Sunday and takes all day to replace. You know how much wasted plastic gets thrown away at every Walgreens every Sunday? Fucking crazy. So digital tags could be a good thing but of course they will abuse this and fuck customers.
Assuming people are paying attention to the price when they grab it off the shelf and checking it against the price that comes up on the register is a big jump imo. Maybe the old lady clipping coupons will notice.
As people’s wallets tighten they’re going to start being more aware of what the cost of the item is.
The worst time to do this is during an economic downturn.
I think this is another gimmick to push Walmart Pay. I bet they’re also going to start up an ad campaign for Scan and Go to secure your price.
