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Walmart says it's not using personal information to set prices as it expands digital shelf labels (apnews.com)
submitted 2 days ago by to c/news@lemmy.world
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Walmart is aiming to assuage customers’ fears about its new pricing technology as it rolls out digital price labels at its stores.

In a statement posted on the company’s website, Walmart Inc.'s CEO John Furner vowed that the Bentonville, Arkansas-based retailer isn’t using personal information like income, shopping history or a customer’s willingness to pay to set prices, and it won’t be doing so in the future either.

“We don’t set different prices based on who you are or the time of day, and we won’t,” Furner wrote Friday. “Whether you’re buying groceries or electronics on a hot afternoon or in a sudden rush for an item, it’s never a reason to charge you more.”

The pledge from Walmart comes as concerns are mounting from some shoppers, consumer advocates and lawmakers skeptical about the rollout of digital price labels by the discounter and other stores. Digital price labels are rapidly replacing paper shelf tags at U.S. supermarkets and let stores change prices instantly from a central computer instead of having workers swap out paper labels by hand.

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[–] -1 points 1 day ago* (4 children)

We don’t set different prices based on who you are

That would be highly illegal around here.
What sort of advanced digital labels would even be capable of doing that? Most shops around here use a black'n'white version of this:

I don't see much here, just an e-ink display with a tiny processor and presumably some sort of network connection. OK, the price fixing could happen via a larger in-shop surveillance network I guess.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 day ago (2 children)

    Maybe they're not yet tracking individuals through the isles by camera, but they can easily use demographic statistics to update those signs throughout the day.

    They could also have a camera at the entrance to keep track of what kind of customers are in the store at any given time. They don't need to have any data on individual customers, as long as their AI can estimate the characteristics of the people currently shopping. Or they can simply automatically raise the price of umbrellas only in the stores where it's raining.

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  • [–] 0 points 1 day ago (1 child)

    Yes yes yes. I was talking about the devices (digital pricetags) themselves though.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 day ago

    Yes those don't generate any kind of data.

    They're programmed using a low power bluetooth mesh network.

    This makes it possible to transfer a table of all prices to all shelves in one go. There's no need to program or send data to them individually. There's a limit to something like 30000 tags, which is enough for most stores.

    The key is that they can automatically update the prices fast enough that it makes sense to do it. If a human had to do anything in this regard, it probably would not pay off to change the prices with pennies several times daily.

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