Walmart is replacing its price labels with digital screens—but the company swears it won’t use it for surge pricing
Sticker shock has taken on a whole new meaning in retailers and grocery stores. This is because sticker price tags are becoming obsolete, being replaced by “digital shelf labels” or DSL. Traders have been trying to figure out how to deal with changes in consumer behavior due to inflation for some time. Some add on Service fees or Sneaky price tagging– But others use digital subscriber lines (DSL) to their advantage.
In fact, Walmart, the world's largest retailer, Announced earlier this month It will eliminate sticky shelf pricing in its 2,300 stores by 2026, a change that “ultimately makes us faster and improves the customer experience.”
To put it in perspective, Walmart stores have more than 120,000 products on shelves, each with its own price tag. Employees must regularly change prices for new items, mark-offs, “rollbacks,” or Walmart's release of a sale item. This process can be particularly time-consuming for the company's retail employees.
“A price change that used to take two days to update now takes just minutes with the new DSL system,” Daniela Boskan, food and consumables team leader at a Walmart store in Hurst, Texas, wrote in a blog post. “This efficiency means we can spend more time helping customers and less time on repetitive tasks.”
Walmart swears it doesn't offer high prices
While this new technology could be useful to Walmart workers, the speed and ease of updating prices raised some eyebrows, considering how the company has been offering DSL services properly as surge pricing has become a popular way to combat inflation. If it's so easy to update a price, why doesn't Walmart implement surge pricing into its business model?
Other businesses — especially restaurants — have recently come under pressure to implement surge pricing. Wendy's faced backlash earlier this year over its plans Introducing digital menu boards and dynamic pricing In its restaurants Senator Elizabeth Warren said “Price gouging was plain and simple, and American families had had enough.” The company quickly clarified its stance on pricing.
“We said these menu boards would give us more flexibility to change the presentation of featured items,” the company said in a statement. “This has been misinterpreted in some media reports as an intention to raise prices when demand is at its highest in our restaurants. We have no plans to do so and will not raise prices when our customers visit us most often.
Walmart similarly insists that offering high prices goes against one of the company's pillars: offering a “low price every day.”
“The DSL program is not designed for dynamic pricing,” Walmart spokeswoman Christina Rodriguez said. Retail drink. “Walmart is committed to the Everyday Low Price.” I've doubled down on the fact that DSL lines make it easy for associates to add prices on new products and update prices on sale items. Technology also makes it easier to manage Rollback productswhich are temporarily offered for sale for weeks or months at a time.
The ability to change prices with just the touch of a few buttons also raises the question of how often a retailer plans to change its prices.
“It's never going to be like, 'One hour is this price, the next hour it's not,'” said Greg Cathey, Walmart's senior vice president of transformation and innovation. Reuters During the company's annual shareholders meeting in Bentonville, Arkansas, last week.
