I’ve already sent feedback to Walmart about my refusal to buy anything with a digital price tag. The thing is, I believe them when they say that prices are only updated between 1:00 and 2:00 a.m. The problem is that that policy could change literally any time.
Walmart has every inch of their store covered in cameras. They have facial recognition systems so they know who I am the moment I walk in the store. They know I buy graham crackers. They know I’ve put up with price increases in the past. What is preventing them from adding $0.10 to those graham crackers’ price tag the moment I walk down the crackers aisle? Literally nothing. They could, and that’s reason enough for me to boycott
Personally I have been boycotting Walmart for over 15 years because they refuse to hire most of their employees full time so as to dodge having to provide mandated health insurance and they have a long history of completely screwing the lives of people who use their automated check out system.
Couldn’t pay me to shop at their horrible stores. FUCK Walmart and FUCK the Walton family who’ve become billionaires off the back of poor people in America.
Yeah, my problem is that I’m too poor to shop elsewhere. So far my local Kroger is only a little more expensive, but at least I know that everyone is paying $8.49 for that six pack of graham crackers
Unfortunately that is by design. Walmart actively works to close down local stores and corners the market on wholesalers to control the price so they are the lowest price in any area. Only ones that can usually stand up to them or places like Aldi.
The fact that the other guy who buys the same crackers, but they know they have to give a $0.10 discount so that he’ll buy a beer with it, is also walking down the same aisle. That is likely what would prevent them.
If they want to do dynamic pricing, maybe we’ll just have to start dynamic shopping.
It’s weird, the higher the prices get, the worse my memory and aptitude with self service checkouts gets.
Don’t you do that already? Do you just go to one store and buy meat, fish vegetables, alcoholics, cleaning supplies and so on in the same place?
these gonna get hacked…
Hacking a pricetag would do fk all, just leads to more people scanning it and getting a shock at the higher actual price.
Someone could hack it to make all the prices $1000, no one would know the prices and then ultimately probably not buy anything.
I will buy that for a dollar. (no really lettuce for a $1 is worth the hack)
Abandoned grocery carts full of food might also be coming to my local supermarket.
If this happens, I will absolutely try to figure out how to game it
Bring items to self checkout. Scans as fast as possible. Walks out with a 20% dynamic discount.
Great, I have a very bad feeling about this, given the possible crisis of 2026.
My local store can not even get a reliable source of staple foods (the distributor often shorts them milk, meat or whatever), there is no way this:
A) Works
B) Is adopted by any non large store
C) Is accepted as anything but a hated cash grab
I’ve already seen them in several stores near me, including Walmart. The entire store was switched over to them.
Do cost accounting and play fair. Will we be doing this short-change shit forever?
Is anybody acting like this is new? Shops relabel stuff with price changes regularly, this just makes it quicker and easier - staff don’t have to run around for a hour with a price gun and a bunch of shelf labels any more.
Improving how we display prices isn’t the issue, that’s a good move, it’s how prices are decided that are the problem.
This IS potentially new as some of the plans involve using facial tracking from security cameras to identify customers and analyze them for their net worth so they can set prices to specific customers, rather than setting prices to specific situations. Also, anything that makes price gouging easier and easier to cover up is bad.
How would that work? I go to a shop and I know the price of what they are selling. It is not so easy to rapidly change prices without people noticing. There may be variations on vegetables, fish and meat according to availability but everything else has a clear price. Some products do have some seasonality or good and bad years but when I go to the shop I’ll mostly be accounting for those. It would be quite strange to go to the shop one day and buy something for 5€, the following time for 6€ and another time for 4€. You see, if I know this system is in place I will just not buy it whenever it is at an higher price. Moreover, changing prices while shopping is probably illegal. I am not sure about this, but I believe in Europe large shops are obligated to clearly state the price for every product. By changing the price several times per hour I do not think that would comply with such regulations. While personalised pricing itself may be legal, and I’m not sure it is, changing the stated prices while people are shopping probably isn’t. Besides, when I check out how will they charge me? This is 6€, no it was 5€ yesterday, you see the price changed to 6 while you were walking in front of it but it now is at 4€.
Easy, replace all price tags with qr codes that you scan with your phone. Then they can make the price whatever they want for whomever they want individually. More realistically they will use an categorization AI to put people into rulesets which set their prices.
Here is a great video to illustrate and educate: https://m.youtube.com/shorts/acpd3UXQdmw
And an article to back it up: https://www.fool.com/investing/2026/03/05/walmart-rolls-out-digital-pricing-could-the-ai-fue/
Well but r/n you can’t adjust the price of butter 3x a day.
(maybe you can but it’s stuff u don’t see. With this tech, I’d be worried they’ll change the price multiple times a day to minimize my wallet)
I agree that the technology isn’t the problem here. It’s the corporate mentality of trying to squeeze customers for all they are worth on a personal basis that is the big issue. That and surge pricing should be made illegal. Having to pay more for a thing just because a flock of other people decide to get it at the same time you do is absurd.
Or they could charge a customer more if they know the customer always buys the same product.
How so they propose changing an e-ink shelf label per customer??
Probably more timed towards certain times and demographics, but yeah it just takes a couple seconds to update and there are plenty of customers running “loyalty points apps”
Already here in Canada.
I hate to be THAT GUY, but I have seen it used to discount stock close to expiry dates. It does not mean the prices always go up.
Man would really suck if internet cuts out to get updates when its at the lowest prices…
What’s the common way for updating these? I have some similar devices that use Wi-Fi but local stores seem to use some sort of nearby transmitter pointex towards the shelves, maybe infrared/optical
It will probably be wifi and mqtt. You don’t need a whole OS to get mqtt, just a TCP/IP stack.
Possibly it will use BTLE or BT5. If the store is large enough it might make sense for staff to go around with android app and manually update some prices, in which case BT5 in SPP mode might make sense.
probably they set certain times of day where there will be surge pricing, like around 12-1pm where more people come in for lunch, and around 4-5pmish where people off work.
They seem to use infrared and or NFC for data exchange. I tried to read the NFC data with a phone app, however the data seems to be either encrypted, or it was some sort of image blob file that is shown on the display. You can read something, but it’s not as trivial as reading other NFC tags.
It’s going to be hilarious when these get hacked
Reminder that by law, if the price is listed wrong:
Sometimes the price of an item in store or online at the checkout may not match the displayed or advertised price in store or online. If this happens, even by mistake, the business must either:
- sell the product for the lowest price - either the checkout price, or displayed or advertised price, or
- stop selling the item until the incorrect price is corrected.
Once dynamic pricing is ultimately accepted as the norm, what is the lowest price? Also, if you have the ability to instantly correct pricing “mistakes”, then you never have to stop selling the product. There’s no penalty for gouging people until someone notices, and you can instantly revert to a known tolerable price and start over.
If dynamic pricing is legal, and accepted by the consumer, whether as frequent expected pricing fluctuations, or the worst case scenario of personalised pricing, these protections may well be unenforceable.
What law? In what country?
Australia, the country the article is talking about. That was a quote from the ACCC website.
The closest thing I can think of would be Quebec, they have some fairly strong consumer protections, but i don’t know how far they would extend in cases like this
stop selling the item until the incorrect price is corrected
Not a lawyer but couldn’t they just refuse to sell it to you? We all know it would be bullshit but couldn’t a company say “Oh that minimum wage clerk made a mistake, but don’t blame them, just an honest mistake.”
Or is the law, if it’s on the shelf, it must be honored?
They would have to refuse to sell to anyone. It would likely not be lawful to leave it on the shelf and sell it at the higher price to someone else who might not have noticed the discrepancy, until they fix up the shelf pricing.
I will institute my own “dynamic pricing” scheme if this ever happens
I don’t know what you’re talking about, I’m obviously not gonna steal anything. Sure, accidents happen from time to time. The supermarket decided to replace their cashiers with self checkout operated by random non-employees, after all. If I happen to ring up filet mignon as a Roma tomato, I think that’s just the inevitable result of outsourcing your labor to untrained civilians with no incentive to accurately do the job .
Self checkout is only a valid option if you are stealing. No, I’m not going to do your job to increase your profits by having less employees. Fuck those things.
This reminds me of Bill Burr’s bit on the subject… “Twenty years, I thought I was a standup comedian. Now apparently I’m moonlighting as a fucking bag boy.”
Is it really dynamic if the price is always “free”?
surely negative numbers are in the cards? since we deserve the compensation for all the trouble
Wait for all the codeberg projects tryna break these things
Finally, a practical reason to have a flipper zero or similar.
Haha, that’s a perfect application for an otherwise almost useless (but incredible) device
If the price changes for them specifically, yes. That’s the entire concept they’re pushing here.
Its much easier than you’d think.
