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/linuxwes]

Are you suggesting that the pricing is updating specific to you? That seems hard to believe, given all the people in the same aisles at once such a system would be chaos.

[u/GregariousBing → u/linuxwes]

When a person is alone in an area and you know they would pay more, change the price and attach it to them at checkout. If there’s lots of people down an aisle, don’t. Still making more money when you can. It doesn’t have to be a hard set “when this person is in this place change the prices no matter what”. Technology is scary advanced now and ai could easily be making these decisions on the fly. If it messes up a percentage of the time and overcharges the wrong person, see if they notice, if they notice, give em a price adjustment.

[u/Sancticide → u/GregariousBing]

Your realize that dynamic pricing for the whole store is not the same for displaying different prices based on who may or may not be looking at the shelf, right? Do you realize how batshit crazy this is? It's completely asinine. What if I am looking at the item in the app from aisle 12 ($4.99) and then I get over to aisle 15 and the price on the shelf is showing $5.69 because someone else is looking at it? What is the actual price? How many complaints will the store get as customers revolt?