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.
The idiocy of people who subscribe to this nonsense should be apparent. MAYBE y ou can track someone to show a price on the shelf, but then you MUST get it 100% right when they check out. In a line. With many other poeple standing around the same area. Can you pinpoint them THAT well?
Okay, even if you could: Consider how poorly other tech works - people dislike self-checkout because those machines struggle. And you think they’re magically gonna be able to pinpoint where you are in the checkout line?
It doesn’t pass the laugh test, but threads like these are FULL of brainless halfwits going “HURR HURR THEY GONNA CHARGE ME DIFFERNT”.
All the tags are for is so they can update the prices LIKE THEY ALREADY DO overnight, but instead of replacing all the paper slips, do it electronically.
The ONLY thing that they could possibly do that they had not already been able to do is surge pricing, and even then, they can surge prices overnight by replacing the pricing slips… because especially after all of this hullabaloo, there are people out there taking pictures of prices on shelves to compare to what they’re actually charged. So even if they tried to get away with it, they would fail.
It’s just more distraction from real problems like wage theft, facsism, wealth inequality, et cetera. You get angry at problems that cannot actually even be problems and waste all your energy being angry at them instead of doing something about the problems that are REAL and ACTUALLY EXIST.