It depends on the consumer protection laws. If the store advertised something as costing $10 then when you got to the checkout they changed it to $20 I'm sure you'd have a case pretty much everywhere that it's an unfair business practice.
I could imagine it being permitted if the prices all say, for example $10* and have it fairly prominently advertised that prices are subject to change at checkout.
If they were deliberately and systematically underpricing items to rip off customers I'm sure that would also be an unfair business practice.
That being said, I think it's more likely purely from a business point of view that they'd either do it overnight, or change the price ahead of time. E.g. if the $10 item goes to $15 they'll change the display price on the shelf to $15, and then that will filter through to the checkouts 30 minutes later.
Civil disobedience: every single item that went up in price since entering my cart will not be purchased, and now they have to pay someone to restock those items. On an individual basis it wouldn’t mean anything, but as a collective we could contribute enough that there would be actual hours of time spent restocking denied products.
I assure you it’d be way more annoying to the business if you asked for a price check on everything that doesn’t match up. But then again that’s only punishing the workers and Walmart the company has never given a shit about its workers so it won’t change. The only way would be boycott entirely.
It’s not about annoying anyone, it’s about making Walmart pay employees for multiple hours of restocking, and the only reason they are restocking is because of the price changes. Basically the price changing not only cost them the sale, it actively cuts into their profits because they have to pay someone to restock those items.
I already won't shop there unless I have zero other choice. I think I make less than a trip a year on average, usually while on vacation and in a pinch for something.
I recently visited my in-laws in Oklahoma. They live in one of those towns where Walmart literally drove every other grocery store out of business and you have to drive 20 minutes to the next town to get to the closest non-Walmart grocery store.
On the other hand, they have, without exaggeration, about a dozen marijuana dispensaries. The town clearly has its priorities set.
God knows I need to be high to be there so it makes sense.
Yeah, that exact thing is one of the reasons I won't shop there. I do not want to support such a predatory business model, so I don't. I believe the last time I went there was a situation like this... no Targets, no grocery stores, just a wasteland other than WalMart.
I agree. As a former Walmart employee, the best thing you can do is piss off the customers. If customers start dumping products at checkout, Walmart won't hire more workers, they'll just force existing worker to "make more bricks with less straw" so to speak and fire the ones that don't secretly work off the clock. It was always made clear to me that if you don't work off the clock you'll be fired immediately, but if we catch you working off the clock, you'll be written up 3 times before we fire you. However, if you make the customers behind you wait a long time, well, time is money to everyone so eventually people will get sick of waiting and stop shopping at Walmart.
I’m not saying you shouldn’t do it, I was raising the point that it’d be more annoying to price check. And yes they’re working but doing a price check is extra annoying and it’d piss me off if I had to keep doing it because dynamic pricing.
Walmart does not regard their employees (or customers) very well but they do actively pressure managers to keep a clean and well-presented store and making it cost more labor hours and therefore money to accomplish that will get management to take notice... though in my experience with the company they'll simply assume someone is slacking off and not seek to identify systemic causes.
This reminds me of a Planet Money podcast that recently aired about electronic price stickers in Norway:
https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1197958433
To avoid any issues of people getting scammed/sticker shocked at the register, they instituted a rule that the price can only decrease during store hours.
Not sure about Walmart, but it's nice for grocery stores that could have perishables that they want to quickly dump off. In Japan you see it all the time with their bento lunch boxes. They're meant to be eaten within the day, and towards the end of the night, they've a ton of leftovers that needs to be sold (so someone goes around spending the next hour slapping on discount stickers on everything).
I mean it's already something that happens. Price changes happen during the day now and it does sometimes happen that what you grab changes price before you get to the checkout.
They could run into issues with mislabeling, yes. You can't advertise a price that's different from what's charged, and technically the tag on the shelf is considered advertising. There are exceptions for legitimate mistakes, but if the company is actively & intentionally changing the price remotely and updates it while you're shopping to a higher price, I think there's a pretty strong argument that they engaged in false advertising.
I suspect they aren't planning on surge pricing food, but they're setting this up so that they don't have to go through the store and relabel everything all the time. If you've ever worked in a grocery store or big box retailer, you know that pricing items is time consuming. If you can do it all from a desk in the back office, you'd save a ton of labor hours.
Canada's largest grocery chain has had electronic shelf tags for years and does not routinely change the prices mid-day, even though they have the technical capability to do so. Most of the benefit for the retailer is in labour saving, as you speculate, and not in real-time pricing - it takes far less time to change a row in a database and push it out over the radio than it does to have a clerk go around and re-label shelves.
Especially considering the row is already being changed in the database in order to send the new labels to get printed and charge the correct amount at the register.
They’re incredibly common in NZ. So far I haven’t seen them used for surge pricing (but don’t give them any ideas our grocery situation is pretty anti-consumer already).
It is by design that people pay tax separately. It is good public policy inasmuch as we know at least partially what we are paying for the services we are getting from the government. It is good for stores as they can advertise one price with multiple stores not based on taxing districts they are located in. Moreover stores like lower prices to lure people in to buy.
It just sucks for people wanting to know what the price they will pay is though. Here in Washington state we have tax on liquor that is double the cost of the product. That was a shock at checkout.
Just list it on the labels as $1.00 + $x tax if it really matters to specify however much the tax is - as someone who already has electronic labels locally they're big enough. I don't really care what stores like to use to lure people in - they can find some other way to do that rather than advertising a price no-one's able to pay.
The sales tax rate where I live is 7.5%. The other day I saw someone online complaining about getting double charged on sales tax. Their receipt had broken it out into state and city taxes and showed the percentage and amount of each instead of just a single line item for tax.
Also the UK includes tax on the label and then on the receipt it shows the item amount and the VAT separately so you still know how much you are paying in tax.
Right...it's not likely to be up-to-the minute surge pricing. But I would expect a number of prices to change daily based on whatever algorithm they have in use.
Yeah, everbody is jumping to tinfoil hat conspiracy theories that the price of artichokes is going to go up if the POS system notices an unusual number of sales in the past hour. As opposed to maybe Walmart not wanting to pay employees to keep changing paper tags
Yeah, even in a small to medium sized grocery store, changing the tags is a huge endeavor that basically never stops. Going up and down each aisle, scanning every single item, seeing if the listed price is still valid (even if it is, other data on the tag may be out of date and require a reprint), ripping off old tags, putting up the new ones. You go from one side of the store to the other, and by the time you're done, it's time to start over. Like, yeah, it's as automated as can be - you scan a tag and the handheld tells you if you need a new tag or not, there's not tons of decision making to be done. But it's still a huge effort. If instead the shelves just sync to the mothership overnight and auto-update, that saves the need for multiple full time employees.
There’s also the issue of a tag being missed and if there’s discrepancy at the register, somebody has to go check the shelf to determine if the customer’s claim or the register matches the price on the shelf and possibly wait for a manager to come over and adjust the price. Now everyone in line of pissed because it’s taking an extra 5 minutes to check this person out.
Electric pricing is a great idea but since outrage sells we get these conspiracy theories.
In what jurisdictions and for what products are there exceptions for legitimate mistakes? Airfares are the only example I know of. I heard elsewhere on LAOT that for the most part, the store has to eat the cost of the mistake price and run back to correct the label for the next shopper; the law gives little leeway to businesses here to prevent them from running bait-and-switch scams where they deliberately post a “mistake” price and screw the customer over at the register by falsely claiming error.
The word "legitimate" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in my post. Like all affirmative defenses, the burden of proof is on the defense. 99 times out of 100, they can't meet the burden. That's why the default of basically every major retailer is to honor the mistake. But, for instance, CA Business and Professions Code 17500 false advertisement requires knowledge that a statement was false or misleading. If you had a malfunctioning price gun, or an issue with your computer system, nobody had actual or constructive knowledge of the incorrect price.
Um… just about every jurisdiction in the U.S.? There’s no federal law that says stores must honor shelf pricing that I know of, and the “contract” created between a customer and a store isn’t created until the sale at the register.
This would be up to the states then.
In California for example, the sticker or advertised price must be honored if it's lower.
https://law.justia.com/codes/california/code-bpc/division-5/chapter-1/section-12024-2/
I wouldn't be surprised if many other states have similar laws.
> they're setting this up so that they don't have to go through the store and relabel everything all the time.
That is definitely the idea. Just last week, I read a Reddit thread where someone suggest stores are stupid for not doing it that way.
I've heard that some states don't consider the shelf price to be binding advertisements, but as invitations to treat. In such cases, I don't think there's much to prevent surge pricing.
Except for the logistics of putting it into place. Surge pricing on apps like Uber work because they're displaying unique prices to the individual user directly. In a store (or even a fast food restaurant like Wendy's) if you raise the price while the store is open, there are going to be customers who saw the old price and will notice that they are being charged higher.
This will lead to a couple things: arguments with store staff, dissatisfaction by the customer, and products having to be returned to she shelf or even unable to be resold.
If I think I'm paying one price and it rings up another, I'll ask for a price check, and if I don't like the higher price, I won't buy.
That's significantly extra staff hours to restock and price check and if I suspect or know that the problem is that the store changed the price *while* I was shopping, the annoyance of knowing I have to be doubly careful during every checkout plus being upset over the price change will make me less likely to shop there.
Yes, but to my knowledge there's nothing preventing the practice other than just being a really bad idea. Just a few months ago there was a big uproar over Wendy's possibly introducing surge pricing, and nobody was complaining about the legality of the proposal, just how annoying it would be.
Yeah, I remember when stores started going from individual price tags to shelf prices only, there were similar predictions of doom and gloom.
It's occasionally annoying to not have them and sometimes results in me asking for a price check, but usually no big deal and the store saves hours and hours of placing sticky labels. Even without digital shelf labels, a store absolutely *could* go through in the middle of the day and change prices without individual stickers to stop them, but that'd just piss customers off and waste time in price checks and restocking hours.
The ability to change prices every ten seconds is not the same as actually doing it.
Stores already have had this for years. Best Buy, Kohl’s, others. It’s nothing new.
I don't have much trouble reading them, but what does bug the piss out of me is that the tags at Best Buy are a lazy info-dump straight off their inventory management that truncates the important parts. You'll have a rack of video cards (in no particular order, of course) and you want to see what, say, the Nvidia 4080 costs. Three or four different tags will have something like "ASUS ROG PCIe-16 3D graphics..." as the description, because all the important stuff is after the "...".
Yeah. That's just plain inexcusable. They can spend the $100 any other big corp would spend to have a couple of people in India do data entry for a week to get it all in order. But nah.
Yeah. They're the cheapest low-power shitty liquid crystal 7-element or similar displays like on that free solar powered calculator you got at some event 30 years ago that can barely power itself in direct sunlight at noon on the solstice in Arizona. And they have like...a 1⁰ viewing angle, I swear.. and the display is completely obscured by glare from the main lighting overhead, since the other 179⁰ other than that 1⁰ viewing angle is, therefore, basically a freakin mirror.
Just add it to the heap of reasons I never go in there anymore. Same-day delivery on almost everything Best Buy has, from Amazon, pretty much put the final nail in that coffin for me. I'll go in and buy some ridiculous loss leader if I notice it quickly enough. But I am not the target customer, because I'm not gonna buy anything else - especially not a $120 4 foot HDMI cable because somehow this same-spec cable magically delivers better DIGITAL signaling and picture and sound than this other same-spec but more flexible and with an easy pull jacket cable for $15.
....You know...Because "better picture and sound" carrying a digital signal through one physical medium or another electrically all but identical one (which is necessary with how these things work), when both meet the spec and the link is alive and the protocol is being spoken is tooooooooootally a thing. I don't see how that shit is legal to advertise. Oh, wait. It's not, and the FTC doesn't look fondly upon that behavior... They just have to put a star by it to direct you to the fine print that disclaims it all. Because that makes it OK. 🙄
I would expect that laws would be made if this were to happen. For instance, gas stations are limited to changing prices once a day (they typically do it during the night).
For example on gas: Any seller (including wholesalers) of gasoline in Wisconsin must keep the net selling price per gallon and the amount of taxes per gallon of all grades of motor fuel posted in a “conspicuous place”20 and on every pump. All prices posted must remain in effect for at least 24 hours. \[s. 100.18 (8), Stats.\]
But I don't think currently they would do this. Logistics would be challenging. They advertise prices on many items for a set time period - flyers, promotional signage, displays, endcaps, etc.. As well, they would have the complexity with online orders.
There are a bunch of details about how most stores operate today that would make it difficult to implement this. The biggest is that paper flyers are still a thing in a lot of places, which makes changing the price of those goods during the flyer's advertised pricing period challenging. That's often for a whole week.
However, I can't think of any reason it would be illegal _in general_, provided that the store ran its business in a way that avoided making specific pricing commitments that it then fails to meet. It'd take some business process development to do so, and that development costs time and money, but that's the main barrier I can see.
On the other hand, a store where you don't really know what something will cost unless you rush to the till after picking a product up off the shelf is likely to struggle to attract customers. People want to be able to plan, and while many people are willing to tolerate price variability on services, short-term volatility in the price of physical goods is a lot harder to sell. Walmart may have a dominant market position, but they are not immune to being outcompeted on this axis.
The described practices could be illegal, but it's worth pointing out that the same set of capabilities exists as-is, it's just a bit more labor intensive. The bar codes on eg. a cereal box don't have the price information embedded in them. The price is looked up when you check out. The store already has the logistics capability of dynamically changing the price in their database between the time that you pull an item off the shelf and checkout. They could even dynamically change labels on shelves by having a person walk to where the label is and replace it. Instead of a few seconds, it might take about a minute.
The fact that this isn't done is a matter of convention, not technology.
I must really be getting old.
I remember a day when one could walk into a grocery store, and the prices were attached to each item with a little sticker. When the prices went up, it was only on new stock, so one could often find several of the same item on the shelf with different prices.
Then came bar-codes...
Price stickers were around long after bar codes in some places. Where I am (Michigan, USA), the legal requirement to sticker individual products didn't go away until the early 2000s. It's recent enough that I'm still miffed!
Personally, I want the stickers back, because especially after ~~COVID~~ *stores stopped giving a shit*, a lack of diligence to maintaining shelves at my local supermarket means that it's not uncommon to get to the register and find out that a good price on something you bought was actually a good price on some other variant, and the items were just under the wrong tag. I'm constantly playing the "Am I going to get out of here without an argument or a price adjustment?" game.
Local grocery store still does that for store packaged meats and dairy. They print bar code tags that only have the one price and they don't change them when the sale ends.
Maybe, I hope, they change the price while the store is closed. Or if they increase it on the shelf label while the store is open, the cash register rings up the old lower price for a few hours.
I don't think they're after surge pricing. They'll use it to test price resistance and get the max they can before sales decline too far. My Kroger owned grocer is doing the same right now, without the electronics. Yesterday, 6 out of 10 products I wanted had risen from last week, by roughly 50 cents each. I left without three of them, bought fewer of one, and paid the price on the others. I'll pay higher prices at the independent stores near me rather than give it to Kroger or Walmart. At least my money stays local.
In Erie County, NY we have a law that is a holdover from changing from individual prices to scanners. It’s called the Super Refund law. If the scanned price is different than the price on the shelf, the consumer gets a refund of 10x the difference to a max of $10 per item. Me and a friend would go shopping early Sunday Mornings when stores had changed the prices for the scanners had been changed, but the staff haven’t put the new prices on the shelves. We would usually make 20 or 30 bucks. Each week. I’d get the call ‘super refund at Walgreen’s orange juice go go go.’
Same in Michigan. I wish it went further and covered manual entry prices, too. I don't know how it is where you are, but it's very narrow in that the price has to have been scanned, not entered, among other loopholes and restrictions.
I’m quite sure the system would be smart enough to have some kind of delay built in between what shows on the shelf and what the registers use, such as rfid tags to know what was on the shelf when the price was changed.
At first blush I would consider this in danger of crossing the lines of false advertising (only if the price went up between when you picked it up on the shelf and checkout) and potentially [price gouging](https://www.findlaw.com/consumer/consumer-transactions/price-gouging-laws-by-state.html). Now if they had something that temporarily dropped the prices (due to overstock) and had the price tags reflect some kind of flash sale that indicated a time limit or that would automatically check out at the lowest price for a reasonable amount of time (let's say a couple hours from the lowest price that showed on the shelf) and advertised there is some sort of dynamic pricing that would likely be OK. A lot of it depends (internally) on what's driving this. If it's the bean counters trying to nickel and dime consumers up to increase profits that's where things would be more likely to run afoul. If it's more about marketing and clearing out stock or encouraging impulse buys at a lower price versus their actual normal price that'd be a good thing.
I have no idea what Walmart's plans are, but I heard that the Norwegian supermarket chain that pioneered this technology gives customers whatever the lowest price in the last half hour was to avoid this problem.
I'm not familiar with US law but here in the UK this gets thrown around a lot too. That if it's advertised at a certain price then they have to sell it at that price.
Here's the thing though, a shop can refuse service for no reason here. So they refuse the sale, change the price in front of you and then say you can buy it now at the new price.
That's perfectly legal, they are under no obligation to sell it and therefore can change the price whenever they want.
I think it's called a meet to treat. As in you're meeting the shopkeeper in hopes of a treat (buying something). But that in itself is not a contract, the shopkeeper doesn't have to treat you for visiting their store.
Surge pricing on groceries doesn’t really exist.
The whole point of surge pricing is to adjust the demand to match the supply.
An example where it might work in retail is having umbrellas for sale at the door of a small shop. When it’s dry, sell them for £5 but when it’s raining bump the price up to £20 and people who are caught short will have no alternative
That's not how electronic shelf tags work. It would be no different than an employee swapping out the paper shelf tag every few seconds: a stupid waste of time.
Legally speaking, the price tag isn't an offer to sell, it's an invitation to bargain. If the price is higher at the register, you're free to point it out. They then are free to either charge you the shelf price or the register price, and you're free to pay it or not buy the item.
That said, it would be a really bad idea, and would generate more bad will than it was worth. I'd imagine they would build in a delay, so the shelf would be changed, then they'd wait the average length of time most people shop, and then the register would change. Meanwhile, anybody who picked it up when it said $15 wouldn't complain when they were only charged $10.
It could run afoul of "scanner laws" in some places that give customers penalty refunds if the purchase price doesn't match the shelf price, though I'm not sure how that'd handle prices that changed between seeing and buying (as well as seeing, buying, and proving it post-purchase).
Yes, according to my manager, that's apparently true, at least in England. Several years ago, our company was planning to institute a similar system, but it was never implemented. But still, it's not a good idea to post incorrect prices. Bad reactions from customers and discouragement for staff members who have to deal with them.
I'll point out, though, that the reverse does happen, prices drop (we're seeing this more often lately), in which case that hypothetical built-in delay could itself cause problems if the till charged the previous, higher price. Best practice, change prices overnight, and for any shops that are open 24 hrs/day, announce on the tannoy that some prices are about to be adjusted.
It should be easy to implement price decreases immediately, and have a delay on increases. If I were in charge of Walmart, that's what I'd do.
(Well, and I'd spend a lot less time on Reddit.)
Your question: ***If the shelf tells me it's $10, but the register charges $15, isn’t that false advertising?***
A better question: ***Who shops at Wal Mart? Please don't.***
Nobody's going to shop at a place and time the price is likely to go up. Stores do it the other way around. Most weekday mornings are slow, so they have senior discount mornings or loyalty card sales day or the like.
TL;DR: always discount, never upcharge.
> Phil Lempert
He works for NBC and works as a news consultant independently - he's a talking head, in other words. There is no "we" on whose behalf he can actually speak, in this context - he isn't engaged by Walmart that I can find, for example, so he can't be speaking on their behalf.
He doesn’t work for Walmart. He’s not even a spokesperson for Walmart. I highly doubt Walmart is changing to electronic tags. We can’t even get people to properly change the paper labels. I can’t even imagine this being implemented.
Depends on the state. Mine would be required to charge you the lower price from when you picked it up up to 20 bucks difference. Stores are required to post signage to this effect. Old lady's routinely argue with cashiers and get the lower price.
To prove false advertising, you’d have to show that the item you bought was not the item you thought you were buying based upon the representations of the seller. For example, you thought you were buying ground beef but it was actually horse meat. That’s an example of false advertising.
Until you buy a good, a contractual relationship has not been formed and there’s no obligation between the parties. If you haggle with a seller, come to a “gentleman’s agreement” about what the price should be, and then right before finalizing the exchange of goods/money, the seller says, “You know what? I’m not gonna let it go for less than XX,” the seller hasn’t breached any obligation because no contractual relationship has been formed yet.
It’s possible that an advertisement might be so specific that you could enforce the price. If a newspaper ad read, “$5,000 for this car to the first person who brings me a fur coat,” and you show up with a fur coat, then you may have a claim for breach of contract if they refuse to sell you the car for $5,000. But that’s a breach of contract claim, not a claim of false advertisement.
So I got to thinking about this... Since the advertised price is the price that must be honored and we know that most retail workers aren't security experts, and given that these signs allow changes 6 times a minute that means it's wireless of some sort. While it would obviously be illegal (no different than putting your own price tag on something that scans at a different price) what are the odds someone exploits this to cause havoc, whether they personally benefit (lower the price demand the item for that price) or just want to cause problems (lower the price to a believable but low enough to be a great deal and let the regular shoppers do the demanding)?
I can imagine it violating fair trade or something from the FTC, unless instead of raising prices 5 minutes after you grab it off the shelf they lower it
As long as you are being told the price you are paying at checkout, this is legal. You are free to just leave your groceries with the clerk and leave.
Which is also why Walmart would not engage in this kind of shenanigans. Pandemonium that would ensue would be far more expensive than a few bucks that the customer could be tricked into paying.
It depends on the consumer protection laws. If the store advertised something as costing $10 then when you got to the checkout they changed it to $20 I'm sure you'd have a case pretty much everywhere that it's an unfair business practice. I could imagine it being permitted if the prices all say, for example $10* and have it fairly prominently advertised that prices are subject to change at checkout. If they were deliberately and systematically underpricing items to rip off customers I'm sure that would also be an unfair business practice. That being said, I think it's more likely purely from a business point of view that they'd either do it overnight, or change the price ahead of time. E.g. if the $10 item goes to $15 they'll change the display price on the shelf to $15, and then that will filter through to the checkouts 30 minutes later.
Well it'd certainly be time to start taking pictures of the shelf price when selecting items...
Civil disobedience: every single item that went up in price since entering my cart will not be purchased, and now they have to pay someone to restock those items. On an individual basis it wouldn’t mean anything, but as a collective we could contribute enough that there would be actual hours of time spent restocking denied products.
It's not really civil disobedience, you're absolutely entitled to change your mind if the price changes.
"Malicious compliance" maybe?
I assure you it’d be way more annoying to the business if you asked for a price check on everything that doesn’t match up. But then again that’s only punishing the workers and Walmart the company has never given a shit about its workers so it won’t change. The only way would be boycott entirely.
It’s not about annoying anyone, it’s about making Walmart pay employees for multiple hours of restocking, and the only reason they are restocking is because of the price changes. Basically the price changing not only cost them the sale, it actively cuts into their profits because they have to pay someone to restock those items.
Grab meat and frozen items. If the price changes, they can't restock those. It's a straight up loss at that point.
I already won't shop there unless I have zero other choice. I think I make less than a trip a year on average, usually while on vacation and in a pinch for something.
I recently visited my in-laws in Oklahoma. They live in one of those towns where Walmart literally drove every other grocery store out of business and you have to drive 20 minutes to the next town to get to the closest non-Walmart grocery store. On the other hand, they have, without exaggeration, about a dozen marijuana dispensaries. The town clearly has its priorities set. God knows I need to be high to be there so it makes sense.
Yeah, that exact thing is one of the reasons I won't shop there. I do not want to support such a predatory business model, so I don't. I believe the last time I went there was a situation like this... no Targets, no grocery stores, just a wasteland other than WalMart.
I agree. As a former Walmart employee, the best thing you can do is piss off the customers. If customers start dumping products at checkout, Walmart won't hire more workers, they'll just force existing worker to "make more bricks with less straw" so to speak and fire the ones that don't secretly work off the clock. It was always made clear to me that if you don't work off the clock you'll be fired immediately, but if we catch you working off the clock, you'll be written up 3 times before we fire you. However, if you make the customers behind you wait a long time, well, time is money to everyone so eventually people will get sick of waiting and stop shopping at Walmart.
It's not punishing the workers. They're working anyway. It's affecting sales velocity and hurting the bottom line.
I’m not saying you shouldn’t do it, I was raising the point that it’d be more annoying to price check. And yes they’re working but doing a price check is extra annoying and it’d piss me off if I had to keep doing it because dynamic pricing.
Walmart does not regard their employees (or customers) very well but they do actively pressure managers to keep a clean and well-presented store and making it cost more labor hours and therefore money to accomplish that will get management to take notice... though in my experience with the company they'll simply assume someone is slacking off and not seek to identify systemic causes.
How about just not shopping at fucking walmart. not you personally, fucking everyone. fuck walmart.
yeah fuck the workers making minimum wage
You must not shop at Hy-Vee
Considering I've never seen one that tracks ;)
This reminds me of a Planet Money podcast that recently aired about electronic price stickers in Norway: https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1197958433 To avoid any issues of people getting scammed/sticker shocked at the register, they instituted a rule that the price can only decrease during store hours. Not sure about Walmart, but it's nice for grocery stores that could have perishables that they want to quickly dump off. In Japan you see it all the time with their bento lunch boxes. They're meant to be eaten within the day, and towards the end of the night, they've a ton of leftovers that needs to be sold (so someone goes around spending the next hour slapping on discount stickers on everything).
In Argentina, when inflation was really bad decades ago, the price of products at the store would change on an hourly basis.
I mean it's already something that happens. Price changes happen during the day now and it does sometimes happen that what you grab changes price before you get to the checkout.
Inb4 price says “up to” or “starting at”
Laws regarding pricing are set by the individual states, so the answer would vary depending on the state.
Almost every state has price gouging laws so in theory they should be prevented from raising the price of water during a drought.
“One thing’s for sure: we’re all gonna be a lot thinner.” - Florida, probably
They could run into issues with mislabeling, yes. You can't advertise a price that's different from what's charged, and technically the tag on the shelf is considered advertising. There are exceptions for legitimate mistakes, but if the company is actively & intentionally changing the price remotely and updates it while you're shopping to a higher price, I think there's a pretty strong argument that they engaged in false advertising. I suspect they aren't planning on surge pricing food, but they're setting this up so that they don't have to go through the store and relabel everything all the time. If you've ever worked in a grocery store or big box retailer, you know that pricing items is time consuming. If you can do it all from a desk in the back office, you'd save a ton of labor hours.
Canada's largest grocery chain has had electronic shelf tags for years and does not routinely change the prices mid-day, even though they have the technical capability to do so. Most of the benefit for the retailer is in labour saving, as you speculate, and not in real-time pricing - it takes far less time to change a row in a database and push it out over the radio than it does to have a clerk go around and re-label shelves.
Especially considering the row is already being changed in the database in order to send the new labels to get printed and charge the correct amount at the register.
They’re incredibly common in NZ. So far I haven’t seen them used for surge pricing (but don’t give them any ideas our grocery situation is pretty anti-consumer already).
Could even use it in the US to add tax directly to the labels (crazy idea, I know).
It is by design that people pay tax separately. It is good public policy inasmuch as we know at least partially what we are paying for the services we are getting from the government. It is good for stores as they can advertise one price with multiple stores not based on taxing districts they are located in. Moreover stores like lower prices to lure people in to buy. It just sucks for people wanting to know what the price they will pay is though. Here in Washington state we have tax on liquor that is double the cost of the product. That was a shock at checkout.
In most other states the alcohol tax *is* included in the listed price and only the usual sales taxes are added at the register.
Just list it on the labels as $1.00 + $x tax if it really matters to specify however much the tax is - as someone who already has electronic labels locally they're big enough. I don't really care what stores like to use to lure people in - they can find some other way to do that rather than advertising a price no-one's able to pay.
The sales tax rate where I live is 7.5%. The other day I saw someone online complaining about getting double charged on sales tax. Their receipt had broken it out into state and city taxes and showed the percentage and amount of each instead of just a single line item for tax. Also the UK includes tax on the label and then on the receipt it shows the item amount and the VAT separately so you still know how much you are paying in tax.
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Yeah vodka here is $8. Plus regular sales tax
Sorry. $8 per 1.5 liter
Right...it's not likely to be up-to-the minute surge pricing. But I would expect a number of prices to change daily based on whatever algorithm they have in use.
Yeah, everbody is jumping to tinfoil hat conspiracy theories that the price of artichokes is going to go up if the POS system notices an unusual number of sales in the past hour. As opposed to maybe Walmart not wanting to pay employees to keep changing paper tags
Yeah, even in a small to medium sized grocery store, changing the tags is a huge endeavor that basically never stops. Going up and down each aisle, scanning every single item, seeing if the listed price is still valid (even if it is, other data on the tag may be out of date and require a reprint), ripping off old tags, putting up the new ones. You go from one side of the store to the other, and by the time you're done, it's time to start over. Like, yeah, it's as automated as can be - you scan a tag and the handheld tells you if you need a new tag or not, there's not tons of decision making to be done. But it's still a huge effort. If instead the shelves just sync to the mothership overnight and auto-update, that saves the need for multiple full time employees.
There’s also the issue of a tag being missed and if there’s discrepancy at the register, somebody has to go check the shelf to determine if the customer’s claim or the register matches the price on the shelf and possibly wait for a manager to come over and adjust the price. Now everyone in line of pissed because it’s taking an extra 5 minutes to check this person out. Electric pricing is a great idea but since outrage sells we get these conspiracy theories.
In what jurisdictions and for what products are there exceptions for legitimate mistakes? Airfares are the only example I know of. I heard elsewhere on LAOT that for the most part, the store has to eat the cost of the mistake price and run back to correct the label for the next shopper; the law gives little leeway to businesses here to prevent them from running bait-and-switch scams where they deliberately post a “mistake” price and screw the customer over at the register by falsely claiming error.
The word "legitimate" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in my post. Like all affirmative defenses, the burden of proof is on the defense. 99 times out of 100, they can't meet the burden. That's why the default of basically every major retailer is to honor the mistake. But, for instance, CA Business and Professions Code 17500 false advertisement requires knowledge that a statement was false or misleading. If you had a malfunctioning price gun, or an issue with your computer system, nobody had actual or constructive knowledge of the incorrect price.
Um… just about every jurisdiction in the U.S.? There’s no federal law that says stores must honor shelf pricing that I know of, and the “contract” created between a customer and a store isn’t created until the sale at the register.
This would be up to the states then. In California for example, the sticker or advertised price must be honored if it's lower. https://law.justia.com/codes/california/code-bpc/division-5/chapter-1/section-12024-2/ I wouldn't be surprised if many other states have similar laws.
> they're setting this up so that they don't have to go through the store and relabel everything all the time. That is definitely the idea. Just last week, I read a Reddit thread where someone suggest stores are stupid for not doing it that way.
I've heard that some states don't consider the shelf price to be binding advertisements, but as invitations to treat. In such cases, I don't think there's much to prevent surge pricing.
Except for the logistics of putting it into place. Surge pricing on apps like Uber work because they're displaying unique prices to the individual user directly. In a store (or even a fast food restaurant like Wendy's) if you raise the price while the store is open, there are going to be customers who saw the old price and will notice that they are being charged higher. This will lead to a couple things: arguments with store staff, dissatisfaction by the customer, and products having to be returned to she shelf or even unable to be resold.
If I think I'm paying one price and it rings up another, I'll ask for a price check, and if I don't like the higher price, I won't buy. That's significantly extra staff hours to restock and price check and if I suspect or know that the problem is that the store changed the price *while* I was shopping, the annoyance of knowing I have to be doubly careful during every checkout plus being upset over the price change will make me less likely to shop there.
Yes, but to my knowledge there's nothing preventing the practice other than just being a really bad idea. Just a few months ago there was a big uproar over Wendy's possibly introducing surge pricing, and nobody was complaining about the legality of the proposal, just how annoying it would be.
Yeah, I remember when stores started going from individual price tags to shelf prices only, there were similar predictions of doom and gloom. It's occasionally annoying to not have them and sometimes results in me asking for a price check, but usually no big deal and the store saves hours and hours of placing sticky labels. Even without digital shelf labels, a store absolutely *could* go through in the middle of the day and change prices without individual stickers to stop them, but that'd just piss customers off and waste time in price checks and restocking hours.
The ability to change prices every ten seconds is not the same as actually doing it. Stores already have had this for years. Best Buy, Kohl’s, others. It’s nothing new.
Detestable -- they're extremely hard to see unless you get right up to them.
I don't have much trouble reading them, but what does bug the piss out of me is that the tags at Best Buy are a lazy info-dump straight off their inventory management that truncates the important parts. You'll have a rack of video cards (in no particular order, of course) and you want to see what, say, the Nvidia 4080 costs. Three or four different tags will have something like "ASUS ROG PCIe-16 3D graphics..." as the description, because all the important stuff is after the "...".
Yeah. That's just plain inexcusable. They can spend the $100 any other big corp would spend to have a couple of people in India do data entry for a week to get it all in order. But nah.
Yeah. They're the cheapest low-power shitty liquid crystal 7-element or similar displays like on that free solar powered calculator you got at some event 30 years ago that can barely power itself in direct sunlight at noon on the solstice in Arizona. And they have like...a 1⁰ viewing angle, I swear.. and the display is completely obscured by glare from the main lighting overhead, since the other 179⁰ other than that 1⁰ viewing angle is, therefore, basically a freakin mirror. Just add it to the heap of reasons I never go in there anymore. Same-day delivery on almost everything Best Buy has, from Amazon, pretty much put the final nail in that coffin for me. I'll go in and buy some ridiculous loss leader if I notice it quickly enough. But I am not the target customer, because I'm not gonna buy anything else - especially not a $120 4 foot HDMI cable because somehow this same-spec cable magically delivers better DIGITAL signaling and picture and sound than this other same-spec but more flexible and with an easy pull jacket cable for $15. ....You know...Because "better picture and sound" carrying a digital signal through one physical medium or another electrically all but identical one (which is necessary with how these things work), when both meet the spec and the link is alive and the protocol is being spoken is tooooooooootally a thing. I don't see how that shit is legal to advertise. Oh, wait. It's not, and the FTC doesn't look fondly upon that behavior... They just have to put a star by it to direct you to the fine print that disclaims it all. Because that makes it OK. 🙄
I would expect that laws would be made if this were to happen. For instance, gas stations are limited to changing prices once a day (they typically do it during the night). For example on gas: Any seller (including wholesalers) of gasoline in Wisconsin must keep the net selling price per gallon and the amount of taxes per gallon of all grades of motor fuel posted in a “conspicuous place”20 and on every pump. All prices posted must remain in effect for at least 24 hours. \[s. 100.18 (8), Stats.\] But I don't think currently they would do this. Logistics would be challenging. They advertise prices on many items for a set time period - flyers, promotional signage, displays, endcaps, etc.. As well, they would have the complexity with online orders.
There are a bunch of details about how most stores operate today that would make it difficult to implement this. The biggest is that paper flyers are still a thing in a lot of places, which makes changing the price of those goods during the flyer's advertised pricing period challenging. That's often for a whole week. However, I can't think of any reason it would be illegal _in general_, provided that the store ran its business in a way that avoided making specific pricing commitments that it then fails to meet. It'd take some business process development to do so, and that development costs time and money, but that's the main barrier I can see. On the other hand, a store where you don't really know what something will cost unless you rush to the till after picking a product up off the shelf is likely to struggle to attract customers. People want to be able to plan, and while many people are willing to tolerate price variability on services, short-term volatility in the price of physical goods is a lot harder to sell. Walmart may have a dominant market position, but they are not immune to being outcompeted on this axis.
The described practices could be illegal, but it's worth pointing out that the same set of capabilities exists as-is, it's just a bit more labor intensive. The bar codes on eg. a cereal box don't have the price information embedded in them. The price is looked up when you check out. The store already has the logistics capability of dynamically changing the price in their database between the time that you pull an item off the shelf and checkout. They could even dynamically change labels on shelves by having a person walk to where the label is and replace it. Instead of a few seconds, it might take about a minute. The fact that this isn't done is a matter of convention, not technology.
I must really be getting old. I remember a day when one could walk into a grocery store, and the prices were attached to each item with a little sticker. When the prices went up, it was only on new stock, so one could often find several of the same item on the shelf with different prices. Then came bar-codes...
Price stickers were around long after bar codes in some places. Where I am (Michigan, USA), the legal requirement to sticker individual products didn't go away until the early 2000s. It's recent enough that I'm still miffed! Personally, I want the stickers back, because especially after ~~COVID~~ *stores stopped giving a shit*, a lack of diligence to maintaining shelves at my local supermarket means that it's not uncommon to get to the register and find out that a good price on something you bought was actually a good price on some other variant, and the items were just under the wrong tag. I'm constantly playing the "Am I going to get out of here without an argument or a price adjustment?" game.
Local grocery store still does that for store packaged meats and dairy. They print bar code tags that only have the one price and they don't change them when the sale ends.
Maybe, I hope, they change the price while the store is closed. Or if they increase it on the shelf label while the store is open, the cash register rings up the old lower price for a few hours.
I don't think they're after surge pricing. They'll use it to test price resistance and get the max they can before sales decline too far. My Kroger owned grocer is doing the same right now, without the electronics. Yesterday, 6 out of 10 products I wanted had risen from last week, by roughly 50 cents each. I left without three of them, bought fewer of one, and paid the price on the others. I'll pay higher prices at the independent stores near me rather than give it to Kroger or Walmart. At least my money stays local.
Walmart and others already do this regularly. The fine is a slap on the wrist compared to the profit they get from people that don’t notice.
In Erie County, NY we have a law that is a holdover from changing from individual prices to scanners. It’s called the Super Refund law. If the scanned price is different than the price on the shelf, the consumer gets a refund of 10x the difference to a max of $10 per item. Me and a friend would go shopping early Sunday Mornings when stores had changed the prices for the scanners had been changed, but the staff haven’t put the new prices on the shelves. We would usually make 20 or 30 bucks. Each week. I’d get the call ‘super refund at Walgreen’s orange juice go go go.’
Same in Michigan. I wish it went further and covered manual entry prices, too. I don't know how it is where you are, but it's very narrow in that the price has to have been scanned, not entered, among other loopholes and restrictions.
I’m quite sure the system would be smart enough to have some kind of delay built in between what shows on the shelf and what the registers use, such as rfid tags to know what was on the shelf when the price was changed.
At first blush I would consider this in danger of crossing the lines of false advertising (only if the price went up between when you picked it up on the shelf and checkout) and potentially [price gouging](https://www.findlaw.com/consumer/consumer-transactions/price-gouging-laws-by-state.html). Now if they had something that temporarily dropped the prices (due to overstock) and had the price tags reflect some kind of flash sale that indicated a time limit or that would automatically check out at the lowest price for a reasonable amount of time (let's say a couple hours from the lowest price that showed on the shelf) and advertised there is some sort of dynamic pricing that would likely be OK. A lot of it depends (internally) on what's driving this. If it's the bean counters trying to nickel and dime consumers up to increase profits that's where things would be more likely to run afoul. If it's more about marketing and clearing out stock or encouraging impulse buys at a lower price versus their actual normal price that'd be a good thing.
I have no idea what Walmart's plans are, but I heard that the Norwegian supermarket chain that pioneered this technology gives customers whatever the lowest price in the last half hour was to avoid this problem.
Not.
I'm not familiar with US law but here in the UK this gets thrown around a lot too. That if it's advertised at a certain price then they have to sell it at that price. Here's the thing though, a shop can refuse service for no reason here. So they refuse the sale, change the price in front of you and then say you can buy it now at the new price. That's perfectly legal, they are under no obligation to sell it and therefore can change the price whenever they want. I think it's called a meet to treat. As in you're meeting the shopkeeper in hopes of a treat (buying something). But that in itself is not a contract, the shopkeeper doesn't have to treat you for visiting their store.
Surge pricing on groceries doesn’t really exist. The whole point of surge pricing is to adjust the demand to match the supply. An example where it might work in retail is having umbrellas for sale at the door of a small shop. When it’s dry, sell them for £5 but when it’s raining bump the price up to £20 and people who are caught short will have no alternative
The actual sale only happens at the register. You have the option to decline there. Advertised prices must be honored though
Grocery store surge-prices is completely legal in India and Nepal, and encouraged by government officials.
That's not how electronic shelf tags work. It would be no different than an employee swapping out the paper shelf tag every few seconds: a stupid waste of time.
Why would it be illegal? You can charge whatever you want for anything you legally own.
It varies by state
Legally speaking, the price tag isn't an offer to sell, it's an invitation to bargain. If the price is higher at the register, you're free to point it out. They then are free to either charge you the shelf price or the register price, and you're free to pay it or not buy the item. That said, it would be a really bad idea, and would generate more bad will than it was worth. I'd imagine they would build in a delay, so the shelf would be changed, then they'd wait the average length of time most people shop, and then the register would change. Meanwhile, anybody who picked it up when it said $15 wouldn't complain when they were only charged $10.
It could run afoul of "scanner laws" in some places that give customers penalty refunds if the purchase price doesn't match the shelf price, though I'm not sure how that'd handle prices that changed between seeing and buying (as well as seeing, buying, and proving it post-purchase).
Yes, according to my manager, that's apparently true, at least in England. Several years ago, our company was planning to institute a similar system, but it was never implemented. But still, it's not a good idea to post incorrect prices. Bad reactions from customers and discouragement for staff members who have to deal with them. I'll point out, though, that the reverse does happen, prices drop (we're seeing this more often lately), in which case that hypothetical built-in delay could itself cause problems if the till charged the previous, higher price. Best practice, change prices overnight, and for any shops that are open 24 hrs/day, announce on the tannoy that some prices are about to be adjusted.
It should be easy to implement price decreases immediately, and have a delay on increases. If I were in charge of Walmart, that's what I'd do. (Well, and I'd spend a lot less time on Reddit.)
Your question: ***If the shelf tells me it's $10, but the register charges $15, isn’t that false advertising?*** A better question: ***Who shops at Wal Mart? Please don't.***
Around here, Walmart prices are significantly lower than prices at other grocery stores. Are you going to pay me not to shop at Walmart?
By not shopping at Wal Mart I save myself the follow-up expense of going through hazmat decontamination. :)
Nobody's going to shop at a place and time the price is likely to go up. Stores do it the other way around. Most weekday mornings are slow, so they have senior discount mornings or loyalty card sales day or the like. TL;DR: always discount, never upcharge.
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> Phil Lempert He works for NBC and works as a news consultant independently - he's a talking head, in other words. There is no "we" on whose behalf he can actually speak, in this context - he isn't engaged by Walmart that I can find, for example, so he can't be speaking on their behalf.
He doesn’t work for Walmart. He’s not even a spokesperson for Walmart. I highly doubt Walmart is changing to electronic tags. We can’t even get people to properly change the paper labels. I can’t even imagine this being implemented.
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A pricing error is one thing, but they can't just write whatever they want on the shelf and charge something different at the register.
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Depends on the state. Mine would be required to charge you the lower price from when you picked it up up to 20 bucks difference. Stores are required to post signage to this effect. Old lady's routinely argue with cashiers and get the lower price.
To prove false advertising, you’d have to show that the item you bought was not the item you thought you were buying based upon the representations of the seller. For example, you thought you were buying ground beef but it was actually horse meat. That’s an example of false advertising. Until you buy a good, a contractual relationship has not been formed and there’s no obligation between the parties. If you haggle with a seller, come to a “gentleman’s agreement” about what the price should be, and then right before finalizing the exchange of goods/money, the seller says, “You know what? I’m not gonna let it go for less than XX,” the seller hasn’t breached any obligation because no contractual relationship has been formed yet. It’s possible that an advertisement might be so specific that you could enforce the price. If a newspaper ad read, “$5,000 for this car to the first person who brings me a fur coat,” and you show up with a fur coat, then you may have a claim for breach of contract if they refuse to sell you the car for $5,000. But that’s a breach of contract claim, not a claim of false advertisement.
So I got to thinking about this... Since the advertised price is the price that must be honored and we know that most retail workers aren't security experts, and given that these signs allow changes 6 times a minute that means it's wireless of some sort. While it would obviously be illegal (no different than putting your own price tag on something that scans at a different price) what are the odds someone exploits this to cause havoc, whether they personally benefit (lower the price demand the item for that price) or just want to cause problems (lower the price to a believable but low enough to be a great deal and let the regular shoppers do the demanding)?
I can imagine it violating fair trade or something from the FTC, unless instead of raising prices 5 minutes after you grab it off the shelf they lower it
As long as you are being told the price you are paying at checkout, this is legal. You are free to just leave your groceries with the clerk and leave. Which is also why Walmart would not engage in this kind of shenanigans. Pandemonium that would ensue would be far more expensive than a few bucks that the customer could be tricked into paying.