Walmart, $WMT, is replacing its price labels with digital screens—but the company swears it won’t use it for surge pricing

Sticker price tags are becoming obsolete in grocery stores, making way for "digital shelf labels" (DSLs). Retailers have been grappling with shifts in consumer behavior due to inflation, and while some have added service fees or sneaky price labels, others are leveraging DSLs to their advantage.

Earlier this month, Walmart, the world’s largest retailer, announced that it would eliminate sticker shelf pricing in its 2,300 stores by 2026, a move aimed at "making us faster and improving the customer experience."

To put this in perspective, Walmart stores stock over 120,000 products, each with its own price tag. Employees must regularly update these prices for new items, markdowns, and "Rollbacks" (Walmart's term for sale items). This process can be especially time-consuming for retail workers.

"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."

Walmart denies plans for surge pricing
While this new technology could benefit Walmart workers, the ease of updating prices has raised some concerns, especially since Walmart is introducing DSLs just as surge pricing is gaining popularity as a way to combat inflation. If updating prices is so easy, why wouldn't Walmart adopt surge pricing?

Other companies, particularly restaurants, have recently faced criticism for implementing surge pricing. Wendy’s faced backlash earlier this year for plans to introduce digital menu boards and dynamic pricing at its restaurants, which Sen. Elizabeth Warren called "price gouging plain and simple, and American families have had enough." Wendy's quickly clarified its stance on pricing.

"We said these menu boards would give us more flexibility to change the display of featured items," the company said in a statement. "This was misconstrued in some media reports as an intent to raise prices when demand is highest at our restaurants. We have no plans to do that and would not raise prices when our customers are visiting us most."

Similarly, Walmart insists that introducing surge pricing would go against one of the company’s core principles: offering an "everyday low price."