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Customers of Walmart will soon be able to check prices on electronic shelf labels as the largest retailer in the country announced that by 2026, all 2,300 of its U.S. locations will use digital price technology instead of the paper stickers they currently use.
There are around 120,000 products at Walmart stores, and each one has a unique paper price tag. Employees at Walmart put price tags on new products, rollbacks, and markdowns once a week—a laborious and monotonous task.
Instead of having to go throughout the store and manually change paper tags, Walmart employees will be able to alter pricing using a mobile app thanks to the technology included in digital shelf labels. According to the company, tasks that previously took a Walmart employee two days would now only take a few minutes to finish.
A Walmart employee who participated in testing the technology at a Walmart in Grapevine, Texas, Daniela Boscan, stated in a news release that the change “represents a significant shift in how I, and other store associates, manage pricing, inventory, order fulfillment, and customer interactions, ensuring our customers enjoy an even better shopping experience,”
No Intentions to Implement Surge Pricing
As a result of weather, traffic, or other factors affecting demand, merchants and other businesses can instantly alter the price of goods or services. Walmart informed CBS MoneyWatch that it would not use this technology for dynamic or spike pricing.
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“It is absolutely not going to be ‘one hour it is this price and the next hour it is not,'” Walmart’s senior vice president of innovation and transformation, Greg Cathey, stated in a statement.
After announcing plans to implement dynamic pricing in February, Wendy’s drew criticism, but they made an effort to reassure customers that the system would only be used to offer discounts and not raise prices during periods of high demand.
According to Neil Saunders, managing director of GlobalData’s retail sector, “I do not think we will see Walmart introduce dynamic pricing anytime soon,” as reported by CBS MoneyWatch. “A lot of shoppers use Walmart because it has low prices, and Walmart has worked very hard to establish trust with the customer,” the analyst stated, adding that this trust might be eroded if customers noticed significant price fluctuations.
Walmart is primarily moving to digital price tags in order to reduce expenses, according to Saunders, who also mentioned the significant labor hours involved in manually updating pricing on a large number of products across thousands of locations.
Saunders’ evaluation was supported by Walmart, which stated that “this efficiency allows associates to spend more time attending to customers and ensuring their needs are met, thereby elevating the level of customer service at the stores.”