Walmart shoppers will soon be checking prices on electronic shelf labels, with the nation’s largest retailer saying it will shift to digital price tag technology from its current paper stickers throughout its 2,300 U.S. stores by 2026.
Walmart stores have more than 120,000 products on their shelves, each with an individual paper price tag. Each week, Walmart workers add price tags on new items, rollbacks and markdowns, a time-consuming and repetitive process.
The digital shelf label technology will allow Walmart employees to update prices with a mobile app, rather than walking around the store and swapping out paper tags by hand. What used to take a Walmart employee two days will now take a few minutes to complete, the company said.
The transition “represents a significant shift in how I, and other store associates, manage pricing, inventory, order fulfillment and customer interactions, ensuring our customers enjoy an even better shopping experience,” Daniela Boscan, a Walmart employee who took part in testing the technology at a Walmart in Grapevine, Texas, said in a news release.
In the statement, Walmart didn’t disclose whether it would use the technology to deploy so-called dynamic pricing — also known as surge pricing — which is when retailers quickly change the cost of products or services based on fluctuations in demand due to weather, traffic or other issues.
Wendy’s in February came under fire in announcing plans to use dynamic pricing, but sought to reassure patrons it would be used to offer discounts and not to hike prices when demand is high.
Walmart did not immediately respond to a request for comment.