"...not talking about price segmentation..."

Yet.

There's no sense closing the barn door after all the horses got out.

I've worked retail and one of the things that baffled me was just how wasteful price tags were.

They change SO OFTEN and it's so much paper and plastic just tossed it the trash every time. Never even thought about it until I worked at a store and had to change them.

I once worked retail and it was a pain to run around printing labels for hours. Granted, I got paid by the hour, so there were much worse things to do.

I also don't believe this is a nefarious plot, but it does enable dynamic pricing. Stores are creepy these days, they have sensors and network hardware that can track you in the store. They also can do facial recognition.

So they know who you are, where you are / where you went, what you ultimately buy (just enter your rewards number!). So they could literally see someone coming and raise prices on certain items as they enter the store.

Not to say that is a strategy companies are actively employing, but all the pieces are there.

Reference to help you sleep at night: https://documentation.meraki.com/Wireless/Operate_and_Maintain/User_Guides/Monitoring_and_Reporting/Location_Analytics

Best buy and other stores have genuinely already been using these for ages.

They actually have some neat features, if implemented. There's one where you can scan a QR code to go right to the product page where you can get, among other things, more verbose allergen info, reviews, or, if the product is out of stock where you scanned it, it can give you similar alternate products or stores that have stock.

It can also allow you to go on to the website, find your item, and ask the pricetag to flash.then you can look for the flashing pricetag if you can't find the item on the shelf.

Ironically, these "digital labels", although problematic in their own right, could help with that.

1. Currently if the store employees have missed a price change on a product, it might actually cost more than the sign says

2. It would be pretty to easy to make those include tax IF these digital labels know which store they're in.

(In Germany) The legal purchase agreement is made at the register, which means you agree to those prices. The prices on the shelves are technically irrelevant, although if they are intentionally falsified you could sue for deceit or false advertising.
Which is why almost all stores will honour the prices on the shelves, even if they're wrong, and also it's just cheaper to adjust the price than to argue with customers ¯⁠\⁠_⁠(⁠ツ⁠)⁠_⁠/⁠¯

Shame if my trusty thumb tac accidentally pressed into the screen and ruined it

You're at Walmart doing grocery shopping, and you fill your cart with all kinds of foods. Are you going to realize the tomatoes are ringing up at $2.51/lbs when the label was $2.40 in?

I don't think it would be illegal, the price tag is not a contract and it's often mislabeled today. The question is, can you get people to accept that the price will go up or down before you checkout, and will they just pay when it goes up or create a new stock return inventory?

If the chicken you've been walking around the store with went up and you decided you didn't want it anymore, that's straight to the trash. What products will they target with this?

I think it's more likely to go down during the day to compete with other stores than to go up on you, but who knows what these greedy fucks are going to do.

If the price of an item was changed after I pull it off the shelf, I'm telling the cashier to take the item out of my order; and the company can deal with the logistics of restocking the item. For future shopping trips I'm using my smartphone to snap a picture of every price tag as I'm putting an item in my cart. Failure to honor the price on the tag when I pulled it off the shelf is met with me walking the fuck out of the store with nothing. Now you can cancel the entire order and restock a whole cart of groceries. Let's see how many man hours of labor you save then.

so they are kinda already pulling it online. amazon does it. but like, they let me know when the price of something in my basket changes immediately. big notification.

very different from putting it in your cart and finding out at the checkout. now if you need to make a substitution... godsdammit we gotta go wait in line again? if they do that, they gotta put something on the carts to ding you when something changes or i'll lead the riots myself.

"Food deserts" exist. For some, Walmart is their only grocery store within a reasonable distance.

Well, I'll tell you why I do.

1. Walmart corporate sucks. Yep. But you know who else sucks? Most other corporations. Walmart is not significantly more evil than the rest.

2. I'm a wheelchair user. I am independent to the point of driving to dialysis, but not grocery shopping. So I use delivery. You know who the only store is that doesn't charge me extra? Walmart.

3. They're not the lowest in price - Aldi and Lidl are - but Walmart is still cheaper than the other mainstream grocery brands, and I'm poor

4. Quality is pretty decent all across the board. Not special or amazing, but pretty solid.

5. They really have their shit together. We just moved and I have InHome now, meaning when I place an order, I get either 9a-12p window or 1p-5p window (my choice), and they bring stuff into the apartment - into the kitchen. Also, I cannot tip, meaning no decision or choice on the matter.

I'm not passionate about Walmart. I wish other stores would get their shit together like them, though, because I'd like to throw my business around. I really wish I had better access to Aldi and Lidl, but I can't pay the inflated instacart/doordash prices for groceries, and I hate instacart grocery shoppers. Nice poeple, but they can never find everything and having to babysit the chat and hope they don't pull nonsense right before checking out so I don't have time to catch them....... it's not been good experiences.

Walmart ain't perfect and it's annoying when they're out of something or they make a mistake, but they fix mistakes, and overall, it's a solid service.

Should anyone else use it? Up to your needs. I'm glad to have it, though.

I wonder if they're all wired or run off batteries?

Batteries. Asked my local store manager (aka my wife). She also added that if you have the Walmart app open and can't find an item on the shelf it will light the label up green so you can locate it.

They run off batteries. Usually an entire rail has one battery for all the tags. But they only need to use power to change the screen. I forget the type of screen but its like digital ink? They usually refresh and maybe change price around midnight where i work. They do run off of something wireless but hell if i know exactly how it works.

Is like to point out that the USA is not a reasonably advanced country. It's more like a third world country with a Gucci belt.

I can count 10 misdemeanors alone you could get for doing this if you refuse to leave after being tased and pepper-sprayed by security.

Better to wear a short sleeve button down and a tie with a clipboard.

Clipboard is a skeleton key and will let you do just about anything.