Walmart is aiming to assuage customers’ fears about its new pricing technology as it rolls out digital price labels at its stores.
In a statement posted on the company’s website, Walmart Inc.'s CEO John Furner vowed that the Bentonville, Arkansas-based retailer isn’t using personal information like income, shopping history or a customer’s willingness to pay to set prices, and it won’t be doing so in the future either.
“We don’t set different prices based on who you are or the time of day, and we won’t,” Furner wrote Friday. “Whether you’re buying groceries or electronics on a hot afternoon or in a sudden rush for an item, it’s never a reason to charge you more.”
The pledge from Walmart comes as concerns are mounting from some shoppers, consumer advocates and lawmakers skeptical about the rollout of digital price labels by the discounter and other stores. Digital price labels are rapidly replacing paper shelf tags at U.S. supermarkets and let stores change prices instantly from a central computer instead of having workers swap out paper labels by hand.
I don’t know… I know that consumer protection is pretty much non-existent in US but a price of a product is still a price of a product. Let’s say they want to go all-in, ignore the law and just charge everyone whatever they want. They would simply put a price 10% below real price on every sticker and charge you something else at the register. They would say that the price on the sticker is approximate and you have to identify yourself to know the real price. After scanning your consumer cart or your credit card they would show you the final amount. It would be way simpler than to put digital stickers, track the movement of every customer in real time, use face recognition to identify them and adjust the prices close to them. Technically they could do all this but for what? Why develop some hi-tech solution when a simpler solution is equally illegal? People would be pissed either way so they will do it only if they know their customers have nowhere else to go. I don’t see any reason to play a game like that. Occam’s razor: they want to change prices at night.
P.S. Unless they want to change the price for everyone in the middle of the day and the stickers are there so only first 20 customers are surprised at the register and start complaining. The rest picked up the product with the new price already… This makes some sense but it would be done in rare cases like unexpected weather change so they increase the price on umbrellas or something. But yeah, I could see that happening.