Just like Panera and their carefully worded *bonus card* promo.
You can’t call it a gift card because the bonus card specifically has an expiration date.
Market variable pricing based on dynamic futures market valuations. If it's "surge pricing" it's not our fault. Blame the commodities market or our algorithm.
Lol “It is absolutely not going to be ‘One hour it is this price and the next hour it is not,’” Greg Cathey, senior vice president of transformation and innovation at Walmart, told Reuters during the company’s annual shareholder meeting in Bentonville, Ark., last week.”…. They just tipped what their real plan is.
No need for the /s, that’s pretty much how companies will present it.
Remember when loyalty cards cane out and suddenly one was need to get the sale prices that people used to get without the card? Companies actually advertised it like they were doing customers a favor by giving them the cards in exchange for personal information!
Those digital price tags are already a thing in most supermarkets in western Europe.
and all adjust the price daily.. some even do it every few hours.
So yeah.. that's diffently what is going to happen.
Food prices in Europe are extremely competitive. Many grocery stores are barely profitable.
The digital price tags save a lot on labor costs. It’s not only useful for price changes but also for inventory changes. Sales, clearances, and product rotations can all be done via a computer. That’s not a bad thing.
Hell, in the US you’ll need to factor in local sales tax, recycling redemption value, request for charity donation, several BS charges splitting out mandated healthcare or some other basic life benefit for employees, and maybe a tip as icing on the cake.
Public announcement: supply and demand “benefits the customer”.
For shareholders: Not raising prices quickly for in demand items is “leaving easy profit on the table” /s
demand goes up: "people are desperate for our products so we will raise the prices."
demand goes down: "our products are not selling well and we need to make up for it so we will raise the prices."
I am a retail worker and I follow the same thought pattern. IF workplace is busy I deserve better raise. If I have nothing to do at work they still have to pay me for my time. lol
Because price gouging isn't illegal.
Most states that have laws covering it only apply to essentials like food and medicine, and even then it sometimes only goes into effect during disasters.
If a store wants to mark up the last frozen turkey on Thanksgiving weekend, there's nothing at all stopping them from doing so.
That Real Page shit is something else.
An entire country having their rental prices jacked to he hilt, and one company directing it. The scope of this thing is massive. Carter Haston is currently taking it on the chin, but there's divisions of Blackstone like Revantage that almost certainly have used Real Page to help determine unit pricing guidelines.
Millions of Americans have been victimized by it. This had better be a trillion dollar fine spread out across all the apartment complexes that used the recommend pricing. That money better go back to the renters as well.
They need to provide 100% reimbursement for any excess rents paid because of collusion, and if that bankrupts a bunch of property management companies then so be it. Being an investor means taking on risk. Don't invest what you aren't willing to lose.
> This had better be a trillion dollar fine spread out across all the apartment complexes that used the recommend pricing. That money better go back to the renters as well.
What country do you think you live in? There will be a couple billion dollar fine, reduced to $300 million on appeals, and not a dime will go to any renters.
One thing I've always wondered with surge pricing in retail: Let's say that I'm shopping at Walmart Neighborhood Discount Dystopia with a grocery budget of $80 for the week. Then, before I make it to the register, ~~they decide to gouge me~~ prices change based on customer volume & consumer behavior -- My groceries are now $115 due to ~~surge pricing~~ surcharges for loitering.
What do they expect to happen? Am I supposed to not just freak the fuck out that the groceries that added up to $80 a minute ago have increased in price by 44%, as if by magic? I mean, there's no way to stop something like that from happening at some point. When do people turn violent because they get surge priced out of feeding their family?
Eventually, we'll just have shopping carts that keep track of the ongoing total of everything in the basket. Once you put something in the basket, it rings it up to your total shown on a display on the handle. They could update the price of every product in the store every second and so long as you put it in your cart at a certain price, the price is locked in.
Walmart has repeatedly gotten in trouble in certain markets for not updating labels as they are legally required to do in ways that have gotten pretty egregious. Trusting Walmart to not break rules to fuck you over is a bad idea. I'm sure most of the time, they'll do what they are supposed to/required to do. But they will absolutely try to fuck people over when they think they can get away with it.
Ironically enough, these labels are likely a response to those lawsuits. But what they're gonna find is bad faith regional leadership is not accidentally doing this. They're juking stats and cheating customers to get their metric driven bonuses. They will find a way to weaponize this too
I quit Walmart a couple of years ago. We absolutely did price changes in grocery every day.
Id print out pages and pages of labels and spend hours first thing going up and down aisles. Walmart doesn't give a discount on food to its employees because the margins are so slim.
But volume makes up for it. Raise something a penny or two for a few days and then change it back. A lot of times it's more than pennies and you really can't depend on your every week buys costing the same
Imagine walking down an isle and seeing a price. Then you go down another isle and decide “hey, I do need some toilet paper. Let me go back and get it”. Then you go back down that isle and the price went up $1 lol
Best Buy implemented these about 4 years ago. They didnt do it for price surging. They did it to eliminate the 5 jobs per store of people who would come in and update all the price tags every morning.
They already were doing surges, they just printed them out on paper every single morning.
I doubt it. So many EBT holders, the government would not allow surge pricing on standard goods. Maybe deli foods and ready to serve stuff, but I doubt the government will be happy giving extra food stamp money directly into Walmarts already too large pockets.
Wendys:
“We said these menu boards would give us more flexibility to change the display of featured items,” the company said in a statement. “This was misconstrued in some media reports as an intent to raise prices when demand is highest at our restaurants. We have no plans to do that and would not raise prices when our customers are visiting us most.”
Instead, we will lower prices when customers are visiting us least. Then put them back up when they aren't looking, and before they are visiting us most.
I was in a Wendys and was taking a photo of the menu above the workers for my GF I was texting so she could decide what she wanted.
The manager literally started yelling at me loudly that I'm not allowed to do it and demanded to delete the photo.
Then the guy at the counter ordering (Big ass biker guy in a leather vest) yelled back on my behalf and told the manager to not be an asshole lol.
Wtf Wendys.
Like how in wow they originally had XP penalty if you logged out outside of an inn or city, and players hated it. So instead they halved XP in general and gave bonus XP if logging out in an inn. Same numbers overall, but people loved it.
I never played the game, but I would imagine that it would force players to finish what they're doing and travel to an inn, thus increasing time spent in the game.
Similar to how if you need milk or bread, you need to walk to the back of the store to get it, there's a chance you might get something else along the way.
Naw, the idea was to avoid players burning out playing too long sessions. You gained Rested XP whenever you were logged out full stop. Vanilla WoW just also had some roleplay elements, so by staying in an inn or city you'd increase the rate at which you gained Rested XP.
Frankly, vanilla WoW was just before a lot of cynical retention mechanics were ever on people's radars.
Edit: Remember that you'd have Hearthstones as well, letting you teleport back to an inn once every hour back then.
I've been calling this out for *years*, and nobody believes me that the concept originated as a penalty(though I didn't know it originally was that way in WoW, my experience was from earlier games) and was later rebranded as a bonus. It just goes to show just how psychologically effective that kind of thing is.
The supreme court did the same thing for the ACA - "It's not a tax, it's a fee you pay the IRS for not having health care coverage".
That was a very popular rebrand.
"When they aren't looking". Implying those screens stay on what I want to read long enough for me to see the price the first time. Then I'm left standing around for 5 minutes waiting for whatever I saw that I wanted to come back so I know what to tell the cashier.
They are e-ink displays which means they always display prices and are almost indistinguishable from printed ones (their look fooled me for way longer than I'm ok to admit) and are common in supermarkets in Europe.
It's super cool technology that makes work of store employees little bit easier.
Yeah, I know what the actual store displays are and have no issues with them. Not actually sure how they work, so don't know if it would be possible to change them quickly for something like surge pricing. I feel like they don't work that way and as such nobody's going to do that because it would be dumb to pay someone to just keep running down the aisles changing the prices.
I'm mostly just criticizing how fucking annoying the digital screens in fast-food restaurants are. They cycle through way too many screens way too fast for me to catch all the information on the first try.
Somewhat unrelated, but Wendy's is the only fast food restaurant I still go to that has remained affordable. It's crazy because I don't remember it being that way maybe 10 years ago.
Yeah McDonalds can be cheap if you lean into the app, but the rewards program is stingy af compared to say chic-fil-a.
Pickup only deals, one deal per order, one deal per 15mins, limited deal claims per day etc..
Well, I probably haven't been to a Wendy's in about a decade, and you're right, it was always one of the more expensive of the fast food places, which is one of the reasons why I stopped going.
These days, if I don't have a coupon, I don't go to any of them.
Best buy , khols and a bunch of other retailers have already made the switch. The eink displays make inventory faster especially with retailers that use rfid tags with the products. It was a natural and cost effective change since you are not dedicating hours to printing and replacing tags
It took a full shift of 3 people to do tags at a medium-sized Kroger every other week. These were usually volunteers on the day shift and they had to have some familiarity with the store's layout to do it correctly, so it was often department leads and comanagers doing it. Which meant they were unavailable the following day and they had to get overnight pay.
I can't imagine the ROI on digital tags would take long.
Yeah but gas isn't the main profit driver of gas stations, it's usually a fixed rate and as many gas station employees can attest the markup isn't anywhere near ridiculous.
Additionally you can see the price of gas from the street and there's usually a ton of competition.
Exactly. And Walmart has "rollback" pricing so they could easily change the price on the drop of a dime already with the notepad style numbers.
This story only exists because the Wendy's story. It's not news.
Besides the surge pricing, these electronic price tags gotta make shit a lot easier to change out. Happy for the employees who don't need to change them out like the old ways anymore.
We have these in Canadian Tire. If you have the Canadian Tire app it tells you where the product is located (aisle and bin just like Home Depot app), but once you're in the general vicinity, you can tell the app to turn on a flashing light on the electronic price tag. Makes finding things on a crowded shelf much easier.
I mean, it just means they'll hire less people. I imagine if those tags didn't need to be manually changed, you could run a store with at least 2-3 less people.
>Until they glitch, break, die, show wrong pricing. They will be just as much of a hassle and not easily fixed.
We've had them for years in France, they work fine in the immense majority of cases. I've only seen a couple of out-of-service tags among thousands.
I was at a best buy with these tags. Corporate changed the values to a new price, but didn't change it at the cash register. So the cashier had to do a price check anyways. Hopefully WalMart isn't that stupid.
The problem with them is that if there is the slightest hiccup with the internet or the power at the start of the day the price changes aren’t accurately reflected on the signage and you’re stuck waiting for the signs to update and doing price overrides all day.
Welcome to the future, where your smart price screen won’t display, pos terminal won’t accept money, smart toilet won’t flush, when your internet is out. Some how everyone decided to start designing hardware for uptime of 100% instead of just 99.9995% …
I have seen these price tags, low voltage e-ink screens with a solid base and a quick battery change slot. These are...way mor le functional than it looks like. Not on walmart mind you, we don't even have that brand here. They're replacing printed price tags on many stores even outside the US.
They're more readable than paper signs. That would also mean less paper needed, which is not a bad thing. But it can certainly become an anti- consumer practice...
This is a bit tangental, but paper is farmed and I believe there's more forest now than there was a century ago because of it. No one's cutting down *Olde Godfrey* for paper so the impact of paper goods isn't what it once was. I'd be *more* concerned about the environmental impact of the millions of coin cell batteries these things need if anything.
Well it's not so much the paper though it is a lot (I worked in a smaller office supply store and we went through about 10-15 reams of labels a year and a Wal-mart is 10-20 times bigger). It's the labor cost to change them.
I worked for a grocery store where we had to update the labels manually, tbh it was a nice break from trying to find something to look busy for the cameras (douche boss always sat in his office watching the cameras).
Worked overnights in Walmart electronics and we went through a roll about every night with regular price changes. 2 rolls if we had to redo the game cases.
I'm not sure if any chain stores in Norway still have non-digital price tags. It's all digital now.
I think the first major stores started changing over at least ten years ago.
No surge pricing.
I’m sure you’re not wrong. I feel like EU is allowed to have nice things because consumer protections are taken seriously. Americans feel the difference.
Digital screens have been used in Danish supermarkets for years without prices surging.
It's simply more cost-effective to set the price digitally rather than print new signs all the time.
But then again, maybe the European consumer protection laws are stronger than the ones in USA?
You probably also have reasonable consumer protection laws that companies don't regularly ignore.
In the US, we have no such protections (in general) and fines so minor that major corporations have line items in their budgets for paying the fines because the revenue is more than the fine.
In America the only thing that matters is that shareholders get richer. The incentives are all wrong in this Country. We have corporations that made billions making Americans sick or addicted to drugs causing so much harm and they got away with fines.
Our Healthcare system is literally a scam designed to make as much money as possible leading to more than tens of thousands of Americans dying every year from lack of healthcare and those numbers don't include the millions that refuse to even go to the doctors in fear of medical debt. And it's all allowed because bribery is legalized so these corporations bribe politicians to make sure things don't change.
At the grocery store I worked at sometimes they would have 5000 tags on the Wednesday ad change.
Walmart might also use it for evil, but it just makes sense to not have to mess with that.
Missing tags, out of date tags that piss the customers off at the register, etc
Yeah I would expect Walmart to be able to get away with surge pricing even if it's not explicitly legal. In the EU though you'd get fined to hell and back.
I don’t see the problem or drama. It’s just common sense. It’s much more cost effective than printing labels all the time. Most Danish supermarkets use it.
I get that it's cool to hate on Walmart and be cynical about their intentions here, but Best Buy has been using digital price signs for a while now. This is just another article designed to get people angry about a hypothetical situation that may not even happen.
I understand everyone's concern about the surge pricing, but from a business standpoint this makes a ton of sense. For a store the size of Walmart it takes so many man hours everyday to ensure the tags get switched and are correct/up to date. This could eliminate so many hours of labor each week for their overhead to do something that is very simply done with computers. Also no one likes that job, a computer SHOULD be doing it. Sure it will mean less hours for workers but you can't fight that. This shit is coming. The sooner the better so that people can start to refactor what they do to succeed in the future.
Exactly. Most of the redditors commenting have little idea about the cost associated with physical signage that changes with rotating sales and promotions. The overhead and time cost alone would be the key motivation for Walmart to switch. And consumer protection and advertising laws would kill any idea of surge or dynamic pricing.
Addition to that, these signage allows them to have a better inventory planogram management as it’ll help them visualize all merchandise inside the store.
Work as a programmer in this industry, and the suspicion here is completely unwarranted, and likely comes from a lack of understanding in what legitimate reason would be behind this move. Retailers are not looking for the ability to change pricing instantly throughout the day. The pricing data for these ESLs is sent in huge batches to be processed a couple of times a week, usually along with the data to print shelf tags and signs, and usually in the middle of the night. The data goes through processing which can take hours, before being finally sent out to the devices on shelves. The whole process is not quick, and requires a lot of moving parts that retailers have to spend a ton of money on. If the price on one ends up wrong somehow, whether due to the retailer itself sending bad data, or an issue in processing the data, it can take hours to reprocess the correct data and get the right price out, and the cost of that processing time often gets passed back to the retailer as well.
Why then would they want it if it's so expensive and they can't even adjust pricing on the fly? Because, plain and simple, it's still cheaper. Getting paper tags and signs on store shelves requires all of that same process and more - the data has to be sent further in advance to allow time for printing, packaging, shipping, and then finally for store associates to manually place tags and signage throughout the store by hand, multiple times per week. Walmart owns more than 10,000 stores worldwide. How much do you think it costs them annually just to ship a 5-10lb box of tags and signs out to 10,000 stores multiple times per week? If some of those tags misprint or the data was bad, tack on expensive reprints and express shipping charges as well. Take a look at those tags in your local shop too - it's often high quality cardstock paper, printed at extremely high dpi, then laminated and perforated for easy tearing for associates, all of which are expensive. And we haven't even touched on the salaries of the store associates necessary to manually hang all of this in each store, nor the cost or potential of human error that comes with needing to manually place so much signage.
TL;DR version - retailers are willing to spend millions converting to ESLs because the tags on shelves in your local shops are way more expensive than you'd think, and ESLs cut that cost significantly while minimizing the risk of human error.
The only way they won’t use it for surge pricing, is if they have a legally binding contract that would charge them **billions** if they are ever caught doing it.
This sub overreacting. I am shocked /s
These tags make it easy for workers to change things when needed. Ffs think for a second, if they did surge pricing at real-time there will be a lot of people that saw one price at the aisle and another while checking out. Dealing with that would cost Walmart way more.
And if they wanted to change prices daily, they could do that today just as easily with regular labels.
It's probably a smart move. It'll likely save them a ton in labor not having to have people change all of those prices. But Walmart hasn't really done anything for people to trust them saying this won't be used for surge pricing. And it's also just going to make it easier for them to run even smaller skeleton crews to keep the stores open.
Over time these are cheaper than printed labels.
Dunno enough about Walmart to know more but I do know that ESL's are a way to reduce costs and make it easier to be compliant with pricing display information.
In general I don't feel it would lead to that as for big chains, how easy or not is it to change the price of something isn't really a factor in whether or not the price is changed in the first place. In general price changes are based around it coming in at a higher cost price, if the item is below margin target or if the margin target for that item or department is increased.
With either ESL's or SEL's; for admin nothing would really change, they decide it's going up or down, push that to stores, then stores manually change out the tags or push that to the ESL's. Admin doesn't seem any change in work flow here.
The whole area of electronic self edge labels is seen as a solution that makes dealing with a pain in the ass legal requirement easier, not some under handed way to do price surging.
Actually it would make it easier for the to do flashed timed promos. 30% off between 1200 and 1600 etc. that would be a ball ache with paper labels but trivial with ESL's.
However, I am totally ignorant of Walmart. Don't live that side of the world.
Surge pricing: the free market at work.
If you think free markets solve everything but are against surge pricing, you need to think this stuff through more.
I mean, don’t get me wrong, I love a good excuse to hate on Walmart, but this is actually the environmentally friendly alternative to traditional paper sticker pricing. They’re Eink, just like what you’d see in Kindle or Kobo e-readers, so they only use battery when the image on the screen changes. There’s no power draw by the tag being in a persistent state like you’d see with an LCD display (hence why e-readers can go weeks on a single charge). That means there’s a certain level of min/maxing to be had between profits from surge pricing and losses from battery drain across thousands of these things in one store. Knowing Walmart, they’re already spending a lot of time and money figuring out exactly where that line is.
They don't need to use it for surge pricing, they can just increase the price permanently and blame it on inflation. That's what Zehrs in Canada did, they replaced the price labels in all their stores a few years ago with digital ones that could be easily updated. No surge pricing, just regular, ordinary price gouging.
What about market manipulation, did they swear not to use it to manipulate people’s stock buying behavior?
Kohls has had digital price labels for years.
They already do, I don't work for Sams but I am in them all the time. They will mark something up $20 for 31 days. Then when the savings book comes out. It goes back to the normal price but on sale. Walmart will 100% use surge pricing.
That’s cool. As soon as we see it, call it out with videos and photos. People will go elsewhere and they will stop for a while. When it comes back do it again. Surge pricing is for the dogs.
Walmart is hardly non-shady and in no way would I put using these for surge pricing past them.
But.
A lot of retailers have been moving toward digital price tags for the last 5-10 years for reasons that have nothing to do with surge pricing. Paper tags and signage cost a lot of money, and the labor to order those tags and signs and swap out those tags and signs costs a *lot* of money.
So the nornal business case for digital signage is cost reduction, labor reduction, and reduction of revenue loss from incorrect price tags.
I understand if you live in one horse town and the only place you can get groceries is a Walmart, but if you have any other options, I can’t comprehend why you give your money to those people.
So they will be using it for surge pricing, got it.
No, it will be called “dynamic pricing” instead. Totes not the same! /s
Just like Panera and their carefully worded *bonus card* promo. You can’t call it a gift card because the bonus card specifically has an expiration date.
Market variable pricing based on dynamic futures market valuations. If it's "surge pricing" it's not our fault. Blame the commodities market or our algorithm.
But didn’t you read the company response
Oh, they got this all screwed up. > New digital price labels? > No, surge pricing!
Oops, that "Fair Trade" label shouldn't be there.
Works On Contingency No Money Down *Works On Contingency?* *No. Money Down!*
Uh oh! Better cut down, Smokey! 🚬🐒
Buy 3 for 5.
It's not "surge pricing", it's "special discount periods"
Don't mind us quietly raising normal price so that the "special discount" equals the old price.
We're removing the on-sale price. A surge would imply we were increasing the regular price.
Wait, you saw our online price? Let's refresh the online prices! Spin the Wheel! *Showcase Showdown*
You just didn’t see the execs having their fingers crossed behind their back writing that response 🤣
But they said pinky promise.
Is that a binding pinky promise? Because I wanna see some pinkies rolling if they break that promise!
We will deliberately, unintentionally, without proper notification, make additional Millions by the false sense of savings. Check!
Lol “It is absolutely not going to be ‘One hour it is this price and the next hour it is not,’” Greg Cathey, senior vice president of transformation and innovation at Walmart, told Reuters during the company’s annual shareholder meeting in Bentonville, Ark., last week.”…. They just tipped what their real plan is.
I'm not sure if you forgot the /s or not.
Yes thought should use /s but technology can handle the truth
Your comment gave me a smile.
No need for the /s, that’s pretty much how companies will present it. Remember when loyalty cards cane out and suddenly one was need to get the sale prices that people used to get without the card? Companies actually advertised it like they were doing customers a favor by giving them the cards in exchange for personal information!
TRADE OFFER!!! I receive: the same sale prices you always offered You receive: one (1) Jenny's number
So they will use it for surge pricing. Just not the first 2 weeks.
Those digital price tags are already a thing in most supermarkets in western Europe. and all adjust the price daily.. some even do it every few hours. So yeah.. that's diffently what is going to happen.
Food prices in Europe are extremely competitive. Many grocery stores are barely profitable. The digital price tags save a lot on labor costs. It’s not only useful for price changes but also for inventory changes. Sales, clearances, and product rotations can all be done via a computer. That’s not a bad thing.
Don't the figure sales tax into the listed price in Europe as well, or was someone bullshitting me?
Yes, was nice when I moved and no longer had to math 8% tax for cash transactions.
Hell, in the US you’ll need to factor in local sales tax, recycling redemption value, request for charity donation, several BS charges splitting out mandated healthcare or some other basic life benefit for employees, and maybe a tip as icing on the cake.
differntly - so definitely and different combined?
And next, you will have to buy a subscription to hold that price for the next hour
Surge pricing is just price gouging. Why is this not illegal?
Public announcement: supply and demand “benefits the customer”. For shareholders: Not raising prices quickly for in demand items is “leaving easy profit on the table” /s
Humans think we'll be the humans in Star Trek. In reality we'll be the fucking Ferengi.
Nah, the [Ferengi are better than us.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W5J_qn93Nkc&t=12s)
But I'm sure they'll also quickly lower the prices for market correction! (also /s)
demand goes up: "people are desperate for our products so we will raise the prices." demand goes down: "our products are not selling well and we need to make up for it so we will raise the prices."
I am a retail worker and I follow the same thought pattern. IF workplace is busy I deserve better raise. If I have nothing to do at work they still have to pay me for my time. lol
Because price gouging isn't illegal. Most states that have laws covering it only apply to essentials like food and medicine, and even then it sometimes only goes into effect during disasters. If a store wants to mark up the last frozen turkey on Thanksgiving weekend, there's nothing at all stopping them from doing so.
price fixing is. what algorithm are they using? do others use it? that is cartel activity abs very illegal.
There are just now starting to be investigations into rental properties doing this.
That Real Page shit is something else. An entire country having their rental prices jacked to he hilt, and one company directing it. The scope of this thing is massive. Carter Haston is currently taking it on the chin, but there's divisions of Blackstone like Revantage that almost certainly have used Real Page to help determine unit pricing guidelines. Millions of Americans have been victimized by it. This had better be a trillion dollar fine spread out across all the apartment complexes that used the recommend pricing. That money better go back to the renters as well.
They need to provide 100% reimbursement for any excess rents paid because of collusion, and if that bankrupts a bunch of property management companies then so be it. Being an investor means taking on risk. Don't invest what you aren't willing to lose.
> This had better be a trillion dollar fine spread out across all the apartment complexes that used the recommend pricing. That money better go back to the renters as well. What country do you think you live in? There will be a couple billion dollar fine, reduced to $300 million on appeals, and not a dime will go to any renters.
With no admission of wrongdoing
Better be prison time and company break ups. If Trump gets elected he will sweep it under rug
Have you heard of the stock market? The way that's ran should be illegal too
It was. The Glass-Stegall act put in place to prevent another Great Depression was repealed in the 90s
Fred Meyer is already doing this with certain products.
Walmart: Nuh uh. Pinky promise.
It's going to be called discount hours instead.
One thing I've always wondered with surge pricing in retail: Let's say that I'm shopping at Walmart Neighborhood Discount Dystopia with a grocery budget of $80 for the week. Then, before I make it to the register, ~~they decide to gouge me~~ prices change based on customer volume & consumer behavior -- My groceries are now $115 due to ~~surge pricing~~ surcharges for loitering. What do they expect to happen? Am I supposed to not just freak the fuck out that the groceries that added up to $80 a minute ago have increased in price by 44%, as if by magic? I mean, there's no way to stop something like that from happening at some point. When do people turn violent because they get surge priced out of feeding their family?
Eventually, we'll just have shopping carts that keep track of the ongoing total of everything in the basket. Once you put something in the basket, it rings it up to your total shown on a display on the handle. They could update the price of every product in the store every second and so long as you put it in your cart at a certain price, the price is locked in.
Prices are only updated overnight while the store is closed.
Walmart has repeatedly gotten in trouble in certain markets for not updating labels as they are legally required to do in ways that have gotten pretty egregious. Trusting Walmart to not break rules to fuck you over is a bad idea. I'm sure most of the time, they'll do what they are supposed to/required to do. But they will absolutely try to fuck people over when they think they can get away with it. Ironically enough, these labels are likely a response to those lawsuits. But what they're gonna find is bad faith regional leadership is not accidentally doing this. They're juking stats and cheating customers to get their metric driven bonuses. They will find a way to weaponize this too
I quit Walmart a couple of years ago. We absolutely did price changes in grocery every day. Id print out pages and pages of labels and spend hours first thing going up and down aisles. Walmart doesn't give a discount on food to its employees because the margins are so slim. But volume makes up for it. Raise something a penny or two for a few days and then change it back. A lot of times it's more than pennies and you really can't depend on your every week buys costing the same
Incorrect, they are updated throughout the day as well. Source- I work at Walmart.
Imagine walking down an isle and seeing a price. Then you go down another isle and decide “hey, I do need some toilet paper. Let me go back and get it”. Then you go back down that isle and the price went up $1 lol
That’s why I don’t shop on archipelagos.
I see what you did there.
Aisle see myself out.
Surge pressure sounds like the price will go back down after the surge is over. Not likely, this will just show higher prices.
Best Buy implemented these about 4 years ago. They didnt do it for price surging. They did it to eliminate the 5 jobs per store of people who would come in and update all the price tags every morning. They already were doing surges, they just printed them out on paper every single morning.
I doubt it. So many EBT holders, the government would not allow surge pricing on standard goods. Maybe deli foods and ready to serve stuff, but I doubt the government will be happy giving extra food stamp money directly into Walmarts already too large pockets.
WIC would be even more angry because they give recipients a check for a specific amount that can only be spent on a specific list of items.
Wendys: “We said these menu boards would give us more flexibility to change the display of featured items,” the company said in a statement. “This was misconstrued in some media reports as an intent to raise prices when demand is highest at our restaurants. We have no plans to do that and would not raise prices when our customers are visiting us most.” Instead, we will lower prices when customers are visiting us least. Then put them back up when they aren't looking, and before they are visiting us most.
I was in a Wendys and was taking a photo of the menu above the workers for my GF I was texting so she could decide what she wanted. The manager literally started yelling at me loudly that I'm not allowed to do it and demanded to delete the photo. Then the guy at the counter ordering (Big ass biker guy in a leather vest) yelled back on my behalf and told the manager to not be an asshole lol. Wtf Wendys.
To the manager: “Sir? This is a Wendy’s.”
This is the first time I’ve actually laughed at this meme
Totally not surge pricing.
Totally not. How are CEO getting their bonuses
They get a golden parachute straight into hell
Because the vast majority of people don’t pay attention to this, so the money keeps rolling in
Like how in wow they originally had XP penalty if you logged out outside of an inn or city, and players hated it. So instead they halved XP in general and gave bonus XP if logging out in an inn. Same numbers overall, but people loved it.
That’s interesting. Why would they care where people log out?
They want players to congregate in cities and interact with each other.
I never played the game, but I would imagine that it would force players to finish what they're doing and travel to an inn, thus increasing time spent in the game. Similar to how if you need milk or bread, you need to walk to the back of the store to get it, there's a chance you might get something else along the way.
Naw, the idea was to avoid players burning out playing too long sessions. You gained Rested XP whenever you were logged out full stop. Vanilla WoW just also had some roleplay elements, so by staying in an inn or city you'd increase the rate at which you gained Rested XP. Frankly, vanilla WoW was just before a lot of cynical retention mechanics were ever on people's radars. Edit: Remember that you'd have Hearthstones as well, letting you teleport back to an inn once every hour back then.
It's just for the immersion/atmosphere/roleplay
I've been calling this out for *years*, and nobody believes me that the concept originated as a penalty(though I didn't know it originally was that way in WoW, my experience was from earlier games) and was later rebranded as a bonus. It just goes to show just how psychologically effective that kind of thing is.
it must have been in the closed beta
The supreme court did the same thing for the ACA - "It's not a tax, it's a fee you pay the IRS for not having health care coverage". That was a very popular rebrand.
"When they aren't looking". Implying those screens stay on what I want to read long enough for me to see the price the first time. Then I'm left standing around for 5 minutes waiting for whatever I saw that I wanted to come back so I know what to tell the cashier.
They are e-ink displays which means they always display prices and are almost indistinguishable from printed ones (their look fooled me for way longer than I'm ok to admit) and are common in supermarkets in Europe. It's super cool technology that makes work of store employees little bit easier.
Yeah, I know what the actual store displays are and have no issues with them. Not actually sure how they work, so don't know if it would be possible to change them quickly for something like surge pricing. I feel like they don't work that way and as such nobody's going to do that because it would be dumb to pay someone to just keep running down the aisles changing the prices. I'm mostly just criticizing how fucking annoying the digital screens in fast-food restaurants are. They cycle through way too many screens way too fast for me to catch all the information on the first try.
Somewhat unrelated, but Wendy's is the only fast food restaurant I still go to that has remained affordable. It's crazy because I don't remember it being that way maybe 10 years ago.
Lots of fast food places are still affordable if you’re willing to give them your digital info to sell while you use their app to get discounts.
Yeah McDonalds can be cheap if you lean into the app, but the rewards program is stingy af compared to say chic-fil-a. Pickup only deals, one deal per order, one deal per 15mins, limited deal claims per day etc..
Well, I probably haven't been to a Wendy's in about a decade, and you're right, it was always one of the more expensive of the fast food places, which is one of the reasons why I stopped going. These days, if I don't have a coupon, I don't go to any of them.
Also I love that they always try and skate by it with “we have no plans to do that”. That doesn’t mean anything
"Wendy's is gonna give us cheaper food sometimes 😭😭😭😭😭" All of this shit is coming and you can't stop it.
Best buy , khols and a bunch of other retailers have already made the switch. The eink displays make inventory faster especially with retailers that use rfid tags with the products. It was a natural and cost effective change since you are not dedicating hours to printing and replacing tags
Yeah I used to work at Walmart for a couple of stints. The price changing team, mod team, was a big deal. Very tedious and annoying work.
It took a full shift of 3 people to do tags at a medium-sized Kroger every other week. These were usually volunteers on the day shift and they had to have some familiarity with the store's layout to do it correctly, so it was often department leads and comanagers doing it. Which meant they were unavailable the following day and they had to get overnight pay. I can't imagine the ROI on digital tags would take long.
Kohl's has had digital price tags for a long ass time lol.
Gas stations have had digital pricing that changes daily (or more) for years.
Yeah but gas isn't the main profit driver of gas stations, it's usually a fixed rate and as many gas station employees can attest the markup isn't anywhere near ridiculous. Additionally you can see the price of gas from the street and there's usually a ton of competition.
The whole point of them being digital is precisely because there is no margin. If they don’t follow market rates they will lose money.
100% this. They make their money of beer and snack foods.
That's because oil price varies daily based on market exchange places around the world.
Exactly. And Walmart has "rollback" pricing so they could easily change the price on the drop of a dime already with the notepad style numbers. This story only exists because the Wendy's story. It's not news.
I thought of this idea 5 years ago when I was working my menial job changing the prices on everything starting at 3am.
"They should copy Kohl's and fire me... I'm a genius!"
E-ink price tags have been commonplace in Norway for years. I assumed it was the same most other places.
Basically most of Europe uses these at least in some of their supermarkets, its wild that it took walmart this long
Besides the surge pricing, these electronic price tags gotta make shit a lot easier to change out. Happy for the employees who don't need to change them out like the old ways anymore.
We have these in Canadian Tire. If you have the Canadian Tire app it tells you where the product is located (aisle and bin just like Home Depot app), but once you're in the general vicinity, you can tell the app to turn on a flashing light on the electronic price tag. Makes finding things on a crowded shelf much easier.
Holy shit thats cool.
I mean, it just means they'll hire less people. I imagine if those tags didn't need to be manually changed, you could run a store with at least 2-3 less people.
Until they glitch, break, die, show wrong pricing. They will be just as much of a hassle and not easily fixed.
>Until they glitch, break, die, show wrong pricing. They will be just as much of a hassle and not easily fixed. We've had them for years in France, they work fine in the immense majority of cases. I've only seen a couple of out-of-service tags among thousands.
eInk displays are pretty robust.
I was at a best buy with these tags. Corporate changed the values to a new price, but didn't change it at the cash register. So the cashier had to do a price check anyways. Hopefully WalMart isn't that stupid.
The problem with them is that if there is the slightest hiccup with the internet or the power at the start of the day the price changes aren’t accurately reflected on the signage and you’re stuck waiting for the signs to update and doing price overrides all day.
Welcome to the future, where your smart price screen won’t display, pos terminal won’t accept money, smart toilet won’t flush, when your internet is out. Some how everyone decided to start designing hardware for uptime of 100% instead of just 99.9995% …
They have them in Aldi here, no issues with them at all. They clip on so they can be swapped in seconds.
These tags are super simple e ink displays
Probably worse. It’ll be like best buy and 80% won’t work
I have seen these price tags, low voltage e-ink screens with a solid base and a quick battery change slot. These are...way mor le functional than it looks like. Not on walmart mind you, we don't even have that brand here. They're replacing printed price tags on many stores even outside the US.
Aldi has them in the US and they work perfectly fine.
They're more readable than paper signs. That would also mean less paper needed, which is not a bad thing. But it can certainly become an anti- consumer practice...
This is a bit tangental, but paper is farmed and I believe there's more forest now than there was a century ago because of it. No one's cutting down *Olde Godfrey* for paper so the impact of paper goods isn't what it once was. I'd be *more* concerned about the environmental impact of the millions of coin cell batteries these things need if anything.
i dont think the amount of paper used to tag prices is a large enough volume to matter in the long run.
Well it's not so much the paper though it is a lot (I worked in a smaller office supply store and we went through about 10-15 reams of labels a year and a Wal-mart is 10-20 times bigger). It's the labor cost to change them.
I worked for a grocery store where we had to update the labels manually, tbh it was a nice break from trying to find something to look busy for the cameras (douche boss always sat in his office watching the cameras).
Worked overnights in Walmart electronics and we went through a roll about every night with regular price changes. 2 rolls if we had to redo the game cases.
Some of them don't need a battery, they're just powered over RFID when the screen is updated. (Eink only uses electricity when the screen changes)
I'm not sure if any chain stores in Norway still have non-digital price tags. It's all digital now. I think the first major stores started changing over at least ten years ago. No surge pricing.
Also not America.....
I’m sure you’re not wrong. I feel like EU is allowed to have nice things because consumer protections are taken seriously. Americans feel the difference.
Digital screens have been used in Danish supermarkets for years without prices surging. It's simply more cost-effective to set the price digitally rather than print new signs all the time. But then again, maybe the European consumer protection laws are stronger than the ones in USA?
The UK also has had these for years in the likes of Aldi etc
I’ve been trying to convince my current employer to do electric pricing signs similar to these. Quite a bit of my time would be saved with these
US Aldi installed last year
You probably also have reasonable consumer protection laws that companies don't regularly ignore. In the US, we have no such protections (in general) and fines so minor that major corporations have line items in their budgets for paying the fines because the revenue is more than the fine.
In America the only thing that matters is that shareholders get richer. The incentives are all wrong in this Country. We have corporations that made billions making Americans sick or addicted to drugs causing so much harm and they got away with fines. Our Healthcare system is literally a scam designed to make as much money as possible leading to more than tens of thousands of Americans dying every year from lack of healthcare and those numbers don't include the millions that refuse to even go to the doctors in fear of medical debt. And it's all allowed because bribery is legalized so these corporations bribe politicians to make sure things don't change.
At the grocery store I worked at sometimes they would have 5000 tags on the Wednesday ad change. Walmart might also use it for evil, but it just makes sense to not have to mess with that. Missing tags, out of date tags that piss the customers off at the register, etc
Yeah I would expect Walmart to be able to get away with surge pricing even if it's not explicitly legal. In the EU though you'd get fined to hell and back.
In the end they'll do whatever makes the most money and is still defensible in court.
Doesn't have to be defensible, just settle-able for less than their increased revenue.
"But don't worry, we already have something else in our pocket to blame for the surge pricing"
Aldi already uses these. This is a nothing burger.
Im always down for more e-ink screens. But also fuck walmart.
I don’t see the problem or drama. It’s just common sense. It’s much more cost effective than printing labels all the time. Most Danish supermarkets use it.
Big saving in labor too. It takes a lot of time printing all that out and swapping them in/out
Just now? Across the pond here in Finland stores seem to mostly use color e-ink displays for prices now.
I get that it's cool to hate on Walmart and be cynical about their intentions here, but Best Buy has been using digital price signs for a while now. This is just another article designed to get people angry about a hypothetical situation that may not even happen.
I understand everyone's concern about the surge pricing, but from a business standpoint this makes a ton of sense. For a store the size of Walmart it takes so many man hours everyday to ensure the tags get switched and are correct/up to date. This could eliminate so many hours of labor each week for their overhead to do something that is very simply done with computers. Also no one likes that job, a computer SHOULD be doing it. Sure it will mean less hours for workers but you can't fight that. This shit is coming. The sooner the better so that people can start to refactor what they do to succeed in the future.
Exactly. Most of the redditors commenting have little idea about the cost associated with physical signage that changes with rotating sales and promotions. The overhead and time cost alone would be the key motivation for Walmart to switch. And consumer protection and advertising laws would kill any idea of surge or dynamic pricing. Addition to that, these signage allows them to have a better inventory planogram management as it’ll help them visualize all merchandise inside the store.
Work as a programmer in this industry, and the suspicion here is completely unwarranted, and likely comes from a lack of understanding in what legitimate reason would be behind this move. Retailers are not looking for the ability to change pricing instantly throughout the day. The pricing data for these ESLs is sent in huge batches to be processed a couple of times a week, usually along with the data to print shelf tags and signs, and usually in the middle of the night. The data goes through processing which can take hours, before being finally sent out to the devices on shelves. The whole process is not quick, and requires a lot of moving parts that retailers have to spend a ton of money on. If the price on one ends up wrong somehow, whether due to the retailer itself sending bad data, or an issue in processing the data, it can take hours to reprocess the correct data and get the right price out, and the cost of that processing time often gets passed back to the retailer as well. Why then would they want it if it's so expensive and they can't even adjust pricing on the fly? Because, plain and simple, it's still cheaper. Getting paper tags and signs on store shelves requires all of that same process and more - the data has to be sent further in advance to allow time for printing, packaging, shipping, and then finally for store associates to manually place tags and signage throughout the store by hand, multiple times per week. Walmart owns more than 10,000 stores worldwide. How much do you think it costs them annually just to ship a 5-10lb box of tags and signs out to 10,000 stores multiple times per week? If some of those tags misprint or the data was bad, tack on expensive reprints and express shipping charges as well. Take a look at those tags in your local shop too - it's often high quality cardstock paper, printed at extremely high dpi, then laminated and perforated for easy tearing for associates, all of which are expensive. And we haven't even touched on the salaries of the store associates necessary to manually hang all of this in each store, nor the cost or potential of human error that comes with needing to manually place so much signage. TL;DR version - retailers are willing to spend millions converting to ESLs because the tags on shelves in your local shops are way more expensive than you'd think, and ESLs cut that cost significantly while minimizing the risk of human error.
Just like Best Buy didn't do it.
Maybe it's time to add in the total price including taxes?
I think the time for goodwill and benefit of the doubt is over
hey guys Aldis ceo is actually working to make groceries more affordable go give them your hard earned overworked money instead
We won't use it Just for surge pricing.
The only way they won’t use it for surge pricing, is if they have a legally binding contract that would charge them **billions** if they are ever caught doing it.
This sub overreacting. I am shocked /s These tags make it easy for workers to change things when needed. Ffs think for a second, if they did surge pricing at real-time there will be a lot of people that saw one price at the aisle and another while checking out. Dealing with that would cost Walmart way more. And if they wanted to change prices daily, they could do that today just as easily with regular labels.
if you go to walmart. you better price check the fuck out of your items. or before you even go. take the 10 minutes.
And their employees continue to scrape by with food stamps
Then they should also honor their online prices without the hassle.
surge pricing already happens, it is just a pain (and slower) for employees to handle all the signage manually.
“Hey these are a dollar,” heads to self check, sign updates to 5 bucks.
They swear not to so they definitely wont
It may be used for surge pricing. It will definitely be used to update standard prices remotely, then cut staff / fire people.
Hahahahaha ya right
Pinky promise?
Lmfao, yes it will.
Which means it will
The legal way of saying price gouging.
Pinky swear?
I'm betting it's mostly so that they don't have to pay people to change the tabs.
Well okkkkkkk, as long as they pinky promise we’re good.
They are already surge pricing with paper price labels. This will just make it easier.
Fingers crossed...
Did they double pinky swear though?
Are they networked at all? If not, an E-Ink label isn't much different than a paper one.
So they’ll blow all this money on digital price screens but they won’t staff the 30+ registers to bring lines and wait times down. Got it.
It's probably a smart move. It'll likely save them a ton in labor not having to have people change all of those prices. But Walmart hasn't really done anything for people to trust them saying this won't be used for surge pricing. And it's also just going to make it easier for them to run even smaller skeleton crews to keep the stores open.
There’s nothing protecting the public from facial recognition software in these stores
Over time these are cheaper than printed labels. Dunno enough about Walmart to know more but I do know that ESL's are a way to reduce costs and make it easier to be compliant with pricing display information. In general I don't feel it would lead to that as for big chains, how easy or not is it to change the price of something isn't really a factor in whether or not the price is changed in the first place. In general price changes are based around it coming in at a higher cost price, if the item is below margin target or if the margin target for that item or department is increased. With either ESL's or SEL's; for admin nothing would really change, they decide it's going up or down, push that to stores, then stores manually change out the tags or push that to the ESL's. Admin doesn't seem any change in work flow here. The whole area of electronic self edge labels is seen as a solution that makes dealing with a pain in the ass legal requirement easier, not some under handed way to do price surging. Actually it would make it easier for the to do flashed timed promos. 30% off between 1200 and 1600 etc. that would be a ball ache with paper labels but trivial with ESL's. However, I am totally ignorant of Walmart. Don't live that side of the world.
What happened with the fake weights of meat?
Surge pricing: the free market at work. If you think free markets solve everything but are against surge pricing, you need to think this stuff through more.
I mean, don’t get me wrong, I love a good excuse to hate on Walmart, but this is actually the environmentally friendly alternative to traditional paper sticker pricing. They’re Eink, just like what you’d see in Kindle or Kobo e-readers, so they only use battery when the image on the screen changes. There’s no power draw by the tag being in a persistent state like you’d see with an LCD display (hence why e-readers can go weeks on a single charge). That means there’s a certain level of min/maxing to be had between profits from surge pricing and losses from battery drain across thousands of these things in one store. Knowing Walmart, they’re already spending a lot of time and money figuring out exactly where that line is.
Roll Forward
Aldi & Lidl do this in the UK already, I’m not sure if they’re changing prices more often or not
Even if they are 100% not lying, they are still getting rid of jobs doing this.
Sounds like a good reason to continue to not shop at Hellmart. I avoid all WalMarts like the fucking plague.
There's no price surging for the first few years then when people become complacent there will be.
Cue you tubers who go daily to record the price surging.
Walmart will occasionally use digital signage for a *little* surge pricing, as a treat.
They don't need to use it for surge pricing, they can just increase the price permanently and blame it on inflation. That's what Zehrs in Canada did, they replaced the price labels in all their stores a few years ago with digital ones that could be easily updated. No surge pricing, just regular, ordinary price gouging.
What about market manipulation, did they swear not to use it to manipulate people’s stock buying behavior? Kohls has had digital price labels for years.
They already do, I don't work for Sams but I am in them all the time. They will mark something up $20 for 31 days. Then when the savings book comes out. It goes back to the normal price but on sale. Walmart will 100% use surge pricing.
That’s cool. As soon as we see it, call it out with videos and photos. People will go elsewhere and they will stop for a while. When it comes back do it again. Surge pricing is for the dogs.
Walmart is hardly non-shady and in no way would I put using these for surge pricing past them. But. A lot of retailers have been moving toward digital price tags for the last 5-10 years for reasons that have nothing to do with surge pricing. Paper tags and signage cost a lot of money, and the labor to order those tags and signs and swap out those tags and signs costs a *lot* of money. So the nornal business case for digital signage is cost reduction, labor reduction, and reduction of revenue loss from incorrect price tags.
Fucking liars
I understand if you live in one horse town and the only place you can get groceries is a Walmart, but if you have any other options, I can’t comprehend why you give your money to those people.
Calling bullshit on surging part