Mega-retailer Walmart just announced that they're jumping into the dynamic pricing game, replacing sticker prices on the shelf with screens that can change the price with the click of a button.
And I get it.
I worked my way through college at Walmart, and probably two-three hours of my day were spent printing out sticker sheets, peeling them off, sticking them to little plastic rectangles, and switching prices.
Multiply that process by 73 departments and then again by 10,000 stores worldwide, and you're talking tens of millions of dollars per day for your employees to play with stickers.
'A price change that used to take an associate two days to update now takes only minutes with the new DSL system,' Daniela Boscan, a food and consumable team lead at a Walmart store in Hurst, Texas, wrote in a blog post. 'This efficiency means we can spend more time assisting customers and less time on repetitive tasks.'
On the other hand, now that I'm a consumer, I can just imagine grabbing a gallon of milk listed at $4 on the "digital shelf label" when I pick it up, jumping to $4.25 by the time I get to the register. At least with a sticker, you can prove what the price was and not get gaslighted.
Or as we've seen with Wendy's, there might be a temptation to price surge.
Walmart swears they're not planning on using dynamic pricing for price surging.
'The DSL program is not designed for dynamic pricing,' Walmart spokesperson Cristina Rodrigues told Retail Brew in a statement. 'Walmart adheres to Everyday Low Price. The DSLs make it easier for associates to add pricing on shelves for new products, and update pricing related to planned Rollback and Final Clearance products.'
'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.
But there's no point in worrying about it too much.
We're living in a new world now, and in that world, nothing is constant, not even the price on the shelf.
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