Jason Kottke: Walmart Is Switching to Electronic Price Tags

Walmart is switching to electronic price tags that “allow employees to change prices as often as every ten seconds”. No one wants this!! No one wants surge pricing on ice cream and price increases on items already in your cart.

The tone of this post surprised me, especially when the linked NPR article has this statement from an industry expert in it:

While the labels give retailers the ability to increase prices suddenly, Gallino doubts companies like Walmart will take advantage of the technology in that way.

“To be honest, I don’t think that’s the underlying main driver of this,” Gallino said. “These are companies that tend to have a long-term relationship with their customers and I think the risk of frustrating them could be too risky, so I would be surprised if they try to do that.”

Here’s what I’ll say, manual price labeling is archaic and creates a major amount of tedious busywork that occupies many hours for many people in retail stores every single day. Much like barcodes improved and sped up the checkout experience, digital price tags can and have done the same at many other grocery stores.

Think about it this way, when you’re at a grocery store, would you rather the staff be working on restocking and facing (tidying up) the shelves and working at the front end for checkout and customer support, or would you prefer them printing out price change labels and spending many hours each weekend changing the prices for thousands of items to match the new weekly ad? Maybe Walmart will actually use this as an opportunity to lay off a ton of their workforce, but history doesn’t indicate that will happen, and doing so would be a foolish move.

And on the fear of Walmart using this to change prices every 10 seconds or at least to the point where something is one price when you pick it up and another price when you get to the checkout lane, I would be shocked if that ever happens to anyone. Walmart is no saint, but even they would balk at doing anything like that.

I could write more about this if people are interested, but prices change on a daily basis already at stores like Walmart and Target. The next time you’re at Target (where I worked for 5 years), pay close attention to the pricing labels on shelves. You might be surprised how many of them are stickers over the original price due to a change (or two).