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.
winks
companies only lie
Most of the time they just say parts of the truth to shape the perception
Companies are made by people. Its like saying guns are bad, the gun is just a tool. The person or people behind evil plans are evil. If a person shows you who they are believe them
guns are bad
Even if their statement was true, they haven’t explicitly ruled out updating prices in real time like a stock market and networking that across the US. In a cost of living crisis and an economy on the brink of collapse, they have effectively eliminated consumer budgeting.
Besides, a pledge isn’t legally binding and these tags can 100% hide the paper trail of changes from underpaid store employees who’d snitch on the manipulation. It can be controlled by loyal techbros on a backend server without store managers being in the loop.
Ah, ok so that is exactly what they are doing
Since the government made lying to customers essentially legal, yes.
I see this means they can change the prices in the store as quickly and easily as they do online. And, they don’t need to pay people to change the paper tags.
But, you’re not forced to log in before you can see the prices online, meaning they aren’t changing the price based on who is logged in, and I sincerely doubt they’d change prices on the shelves while the store is open, where shoppers could pick an item, and then the price is higher when they get to the check out.
It makes it easier for them to change prices, but the shoppers still can choose not to buy the product at the price offered.
Our focus should be on demanding higher wages, and more rights, through unionizing and voting. We can complain about this, too, but I doubt trying to pass some law against digital shelf signs will make much difference for us. I’m certainly not against it, I just don’t think it will help much at all.
Maybe I’m missing something obvious here, I’m not very smart.
it would be very difficult to target a specific individual shopper in the store, but trivial to do so online (and they do have some different pricing online vs in store already). their pledge to not do so in store is empty. they weren’t gonna do that anyway.
the digital shelf tags allow walmart to do what amounts to ‘surge pricing’ like uber does during high demand events. like if a blizzard is coming, they can jack the prices up on snow removal equipment, blankets, space heaters, winter clothes, batteries, grocery staples, etc. with just a few clicks or keypresses and without using even a penny’s worth of in-store labor to do it.
Not particularly difficult. They already have Wi-Fi beacons in every store and I’d bet there’s a good chance they have Bluetooth beacons as well. With either one of those, it wouldn’t be difficult to track an individual’s position in the store with pretty significant granularity. Couple a position plus a unique device ID for the shopper’s phone (or combination of profiles adding in watch, headphones, etc), maybe even some UHF audio signals or additional Bluetooth signal from the price tag (which sounds like it updates wirelessly and therefore provides a whole additional network of location tracking in the store) and you could just about pinpoint where a person is tied with their purchasing history and behavioral analytics in real time.
The idiocy of people who subscribe to this nonsense should be apparent. MAYBE y ou can track someone to show a price on the shelf, but then you MUST get it 100% right when they check out. In a line. With many other poeple standing around the same area. Can you pinpoint them THAT well?
Okay, even if you could: Consider how poorly other tech works - people dislike self-checkout because those machines struggle. And you think they’re magically gonna be able to pinpoint where you are in the checkout line?
It doesn’t pass the laugh test, but threads like these are FULL of brainless halfwits going “HURR HURR THEY GONNA CHARGE ME DIFFERNT”.
All the tags are for is so they can update the prices LIKE THEY ALREADY DO overnight, but instead of replacing all the paper slips, do it electronically.
The ONLY thing that they could possibly do that they had not already been able to do is surge pricing, and even then, they can surge prices overnight by replacing the pricing slips… because especially after all of this hullabaloo, there are people out there taking pictures of prices on shelves to compare to what they’re actually charged. So even if they tried to get away with it, they would fail.
It’s just more distraction from real problems like wage theft, facsism, wealth inequality, et cetera. You get angry at problems that cannot actually even be problems and waste all your energy being angry at them instead of doing something about the problems that are REAL and ACTUALLY EXIST.
But, you’re not forced to log in before you can see the prices online, meaning they aren’t changing the price based on who is logged in.
They are. Even when blocking cookies, which most people don’t do or rely on the “helpful popups” that pretend to decline them, they can still fingerprint your browser, your computer, your IP. They grab your WebGL context and profile it until they identify enough unique details about your hardware and how it works. They don’t need you to login to know who you probably are, where you’re coming from, and what price they should show you, and if they’re wrong, they can be probably entirely consistent and close enough to being accurate that it doesn’t matter. If you’re careful and sneaky, you can sometimes see them do this yourself using VPNs and privacy-focused browsers and addons and other tools and by seeding your cookies and ad-data to make them fit you into a different profile, but it’s rarely worth the effort and it’s rarely a productive use of anyone’s time, since they’ll figure out the real situation when you go to pay anyway. Even if they do honor the price they initially offered you and don’t mysteriously error or decline or cancel the order, you didn’t really hide anything from them in the end, you just coaxed a bit of money out of them, they’ll eat the loss and pay for the difference easily with the thousands or millions of others who didn’t notice that their price was quietly jacked up.
I sincerely doubt they’d change prices on the shelves while the store is open, where shoppers could pick an item, and then the price is higher when they get to the check out.
Oh, my sweet summer child, they are doing worse than that. They are tracking how desperate or disinterested you seem to be about prices based on past behavior and even while you are in the store. They will know who you are, they will know your circumstances, and the price will change just for you and you’d better believe they’ll know exactly where you are at all times, so they’ll have systems that can charge you the same price at checkout as they showed for you when you’re in the aisle… if they choose to, or maybe they’ll choose to raise the price at the checkout, instead… why not? They’ll probably profile you well enough to guess if you’ll even notice the raised price, or if you do, whether you’ll actually be willing to make a stink about it. Will they be wrong sometimes? Sure it will! Do they care? You know they don’t!
Of course the really savvy shoppers may be able to dodge all these tricks, maybe even benefit from some of them. But that’s not something that actually bothers them. All they’ve got to do is do it subtly and gradually enough without creating a inescapable PR shitstorm in the process so that other, slower-to-adopt retailers don’t eat their lunch while they rake in the increased profits, ultimately forcing other retailers to follow their lead and level the playing field by doing the same thing (because do you really think people are going to change their buying habits significantly when all the retailers are doing it to approximately the same degree?) instead of letting the helpless peasants-- *ahem* customers force them to back down.
Capitalism dystopia is here, don’t fool yourself into believing that they won’t do it, because not only will they fucking do it, they’re not even bothering to hide it anymore. They aren’t ashamed of it, and they aren’t scared of consequences. There aren’t any. They know there’s probably little to nothing we can do to stop them, and they know that if we do stop them on this, they’ve already got a dozen other strategies in their pocket to try next, and they’ll never stop. There is no consumer protection anymore. Consumers don’t even protect themselves. Every industry is made up by colluding oligopolies or monopolies. They’ve won, they’ve fortified themselves, and now they’re sucking the economy dry, and when they have drained all your wealth and possessions into shriveled, withered husks, if there is still work left to do, they will make you do it to survive. If there isn’t work for you to do, then tough luck, they won’t care if you are homeless or dying. That’s… probably sort of the point, really.
What if two people are looking at the tag at the same time? Is it going to show a different price to each?
This is just stupid paranoia. Unless it’s unmarked until you scan the item at the register, stop being scared of your own shadow.
*for now.
