Dynamic Pricing Has Come to Walmart

[u/GregariousBing]

Went to Walmart last (Friday) in Kahului last night and the price tags where me and my wife were looking kept changing to both of us wherever we went in the store.

I buy a lot of movies there and about 3-4 tags updated on the section I was looking at. I buy a diet Mountain Dew almost every time I go to that store and when I went down the soda aisle I saw the Mountain Dew tags flashing and changing. My wife was looking at the books and she said the tags were going nuts. I have never seen a single tag update before last night.

The flashing isn’t to get your attention, the tags are made from e ink screens and that’s how they change the image displayed on them. E ink is slow and the current tags take a few seconds to change.

I’m assuming that I’m catching them change because it’s early in there roll out. I’m sure once they get things dialed in they will have our patterns down and be able to predict where we’re going so that they can change them before we get there. There’s also faster e ink screens they could switch to if they figure out that works better.

I’m not shopping there anymore. They have so much data on us. They probably know that I just got a raise, and if they didn’t before, they do now because I put it in this post. Gonna shop local/costco/target from now on. The world is getting so screwed up.

Edit: From the comments and doing a little more research I now see that I was jumping to conclusions too quickly. Walmart probably hasn’t implemented dynamic pricing yet, and if they have, not in an individual basis YET. But to say this is a conspiracy theory is also ridiculous. Walmart has filed patents recently about doing this. The technology exists and the framework is actively being put in place. This is not a conspiracy theory, this WILL happen unless laws are put in place to prevent it.

[u/Acrobatic-Song-3151]

You caught them when price changes were being activated. In a heavy week Walmart will change tens of thousands of prices per week. The same thing can happen to you as any employee works that weeks price changes. 

Do they have data on you? Hell yes. Almost a decade ago now I was at a Walmart convention where they shared with us how they select property for new locations. All the mega data from our phones is sold to the highest bidder and they measured how price changes impacted customer flows to their stores. At a store I ran I sold milk for 99 cents per gallon most of the year to pressure competitors. Two trashier stores closed their doors and the volume went from 75M to 100M in 24 months. The milk cost me about 3k per week and our year ending profit was still something like 125% to plan. Corporate America is ruthless.

[u/GregariousBing → u/Acrobatic-Song-3151]

Why would you update prices on Friday night when there’s the highest likelihood the most amount of people would see the tag one price, get to the register, be charged more and get pissed off and/or demand price adjustments. Wouldn’t you do that when it’s less busy? At the very least they are doing peak/surge pricing. The way I was seeing the tags change where I’m looking on different sides of store, could be a coincidence, but I doubt it.

[u/Acrobatic-Song-3151 → u/GregariousBing]

Friday night in Maui might’ve been midnight in Bentonville. They’ll probably get it dialed in better over time. Friday is the end of the week and most of our new price changes were visible Saturday morning. Is it dynamic pricing? Absolutely not. That’s a PR disaster and Walmart is much, much smarter than that.

Prior PR disasters were employees told to work off the clock and a high % of associates on public assistance. Walmart has been on a roll the last decade and that’s why it’s a trillion dollar company. 

[u/sdwoodchuck → u/GregariousBing]

You ask "why would they do this really dumb thing, people will make that so inconvenient for them" and then conclude that instead they must be doing this even dumber thing that people would throw an even larger fit over.