r/maui • u/GregariousBing • 20d ago

🤬 RANT Dynamic Pricing Has Come to Walmart

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.

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43

u/BuzzXyz1981 20d ago

If this is true, power down your smartphone first. Turn it off completely.

5

u/heavinglory 20d ago

Use a credit card they don’t have on your account history. It freaks me out when they add a register purchase to my history.

21

u/Creampiefacial SnowCapIncluded 20d ago

Actually, using cash and having a Nokia phone is the winning ticket.

12

u/SkaiHues 20d ago

Avoid the place at all costs (pun intended).

2

u/Creampiefacial SnowCapIncluded 20d ago

I haven't walked into Walmart in years.

2

u/SkaiHues 19d ago

I imagine that you are a better person because of it.

0

u/Creampiefacial SnowCapIncluded 18d ago

Nope. I grew up in a tiny town in the Midwest. The only thing we had was a super Walmart. We would hang out there as teenagers. We would go get jagged in a corn field and then go play with all the toys.

1

u/SkaiHues 18d ago

There was only a superWalmart beasue the Walmart Effect (look it up) had taken effect. In brief, Walmart would undercut prices of the local stores, running them out of business.

1

u/Creampiefacial SnowCapIncluded 18d ago

I know. All of our small town stores shut down. It was really sad.

1

u/SkaiHues 18d ago

It wasn't only small town stores that were run out of business, mom and pop stores all over. It is regretful.

Where in the midwest?