Walmart’s New Digital Price Tags: Behind the Scenes on How They Work | Invesloan.com

Most of the store still had paper labels, and the team had been working around the clock for two days before my visit to install the digital labels.

As many as a dozen employees can be busy during a shift, working through the changes.

Walmart prices are set by the corporate headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas, and managed by store workers with an app on their devices.

Other hardware is sometimes needed, such as colorful frames and pop-ups, to help a special price stand out on the shelf.

If there is a discrepancy between the shelf price and the register price, consumer protection laws generally require retailers to honor the lower one.

Customers don’t typically complain if they’re rung up for less than they expected to pay, but it can be a rude surprise for a shopper (and lost money for a retailer) if a price increase isn’t yet reflected on the shelf.

Each shade of lip gloss had its own product code, so each one needed a label.

The typical Walmart supercenter carries around 120,000 products, and prices in some departments, like grocery, can rise and fall in a matter of days due to market conditions.

He said it takes him about six minutes to adapt a standard shelf section for electronic labels. It’s a few minutes of extra work up front, but he said it saves time down the line compared to paper labels.

An integrated battery in the rail can power the electronic labels for up to eight years. A spokesperson told me the design was more economical than having each label contain its own battery.

Like with the paper price tags, each four-foot section has a particular plan that store employees must follow and match.

He said that meant the labels couldn’t gather or transmit any personal information about shoppers.

A proposed bill in New York state would ban retailers from using shoppers’ personal information to adjust prices selectively.

Walmart told me prices are set by the corporate office in Bentonville, and changes are pushed out to stores overnight.

Some social media videos have captured the prices changing on the electronic labels in the early hours of the morning, before most stores are open for business.

Employees at another store I visited said the digital tags are more durable than the paper ones against shopping carts and other hazards, but they still sometimes get banged up. If a tag breaks or goes offline, it alerts the staff via the app.

“There’s no way for us to be able to adjust that price up higher,” he said, adding that there’s an error alert if someone accidentally enters a number above the authorized price. The store manager at another location I visited said the same thing.

Store prices generally match what is displayed on Walmart.com, Zeman said.

The workers called this concept “modular integrity” and said it helps make restocking easier when there’s enough space for each item.

Walmart plans to roll out a feature for shoppers in its app that would activate an LED light on the shelf tag to help customers find what they’re looking for.

The feature is already available for employees and Spark delivery drivers, but the company hasn’t said when it’ll be available for customers.

“It’s definitely made it a lot faster with grabbing things,” said Ben Leikness, the digital fulfillment team lead at another store I visited in Wisconsin. “As long as it has a digital shelf label, I can just hit scan, and it flashes right away.”

“It’s so handy,” she said of the feature.

In addition to finding exact items more quickly, Leikness said his team spends half as much time hunting down products in the back room after his store installed digital shelf labels last fall. Part of the reason is that the time workers used to spend updating price labels can now be spent making sure shelves are stocked.

Walmart told me it has some tech in the works for this kind of display, but that’s not rolling out yet.

I generally found these electronic displays easier to read than their paper-based counterparts.

The addition of the flashing LED option would likely be a welcome feature when it finally rolls out. In the meantime, store employees are being reassigned from adjusting prices to assisting shoppers.

While I understand why people might be uneasy about this new technology, Walmart’s approach isn’t really built for selectively setting prices. It looks like the larger impact would be time savings for workers, which would also benefit shoppers.

Digital labels enable everyone — shoppers, employees, and the company — to get on the same page.