It’s bound to happen. Why waste hours replacing tags when you can just change what the shelf says when the prices change.
But this article is so pro Walmart it’s crazy.
Retailers argue that these innovations increase efficiency and reduce costs in an industry known for its slim profit margins.
Slim profit margins my ass. Walmarts gross profit for the twelve months ending July 31, 2024 was $163.786B,
I think the main concern is that this is a step towards normalizing extremely frequent price changes, a la Uber surge pricing.
That’s exactly what this is. All stores will eventually do this and prices will fluctuate throughout the day.
isn’t it pretty much what amazon’s been doing since the beginning? the difference being there’s no “app” like camel yet to track prices over time at a single store
but yea, still another reason not to go to walmart. how do they mitigate the problem of something being $X when you put it in your cart, and the price being X+whatever by the time you get through the 2 mile long line at one of the 2 open registers?
It’ll be exciting to see prices temporarily jump during the few hours the majority of working class folk have to do their shopping.
As long as it’s advertised openly, I don’t see a big problem with it. It would probably be sold as a discount for shopping at slower times, though. It’s a tried-and-true method of smoothing congestion.
Assuming a store with 9a-9p hours (every day), a 9-5 worker can shop 44 hours in a week, vs 40 they cannot. But that doesn’t particularly line up with the busy hours. Around here, after 7 on weekdays and 5 on weekends tend to get pretty slow.
And personalized pricing, based on your profile and what they think they can get you to pay.
So, if I grab an item off the shelf and browse around the store for a while, is the price going to be the price currently displayed or the price when I grabbed it?
If it’s the current price, what’s the point of a price tag? If I can’t actually know the price until checkout, then showing me the price is kind of a useless bit of data. I also suspect that the “speak to a manager” types would make that a major headache for stores.
If it’s the price when I grabbed it, how are they keeping track of that? I see two ways of handling that: one requires that you use their app to shop, and the other requires cameras and “machine vision” that are still unreliable, at best. The former seems more likely, but I doubt either is going to sit well with customers.
Edit: someone pointed out that it might not actually display a price, and you’d have to scan it to get your price. Kind of like the first option, but I think it’s going to turn off less tech savvy customers.
I haven’t seen that aspect addressed in any articles about the “feature”.
Take a photo of it, I work with paper but we change our tags frequently. We often have prices changed when a customer reaches checkout. I’ve also had times where a customer came back to check a shelf tag after I just updated it. I honored the previous price those times as I was still holding the tickets but its not a guarantee even in paper stores.
Even at stores that have this feature, I rarely see people use it. It’s clearly not an experience that people flock to.
OTOH, on the rare occasion I’ve visited a Walmart in the past 10 years, I have a 100% rate of checkout taking an absurdly long time. Everyone there just seems to accept it like they have no choice.
Slim profit margins my ass. Walmarts gross profit for the twelve months ending July 31, 2024 was $163.786B,
Not to sound flippant, but do you know what gross profit means? They aren’t pocketing all of that. Walmart’s net profit margin is 2.66%, which is minuscule. They make up for that by having enormous volume.
That’s an expected tradeoff of operating an essential service is the point. It’s not as though their margin is that slim by mistake, or out of goodwill, or bad business sense. It’s meant to lead to the situation where we shop at Walmart not by choice, but in lieu of other options.
Not really — it’s because nearly everything they sell is highly fungible, and they compete on price. Nobody is willing to pay a premium to shop at Walmart. Twenty years ago you’d have been correct, but they’ve pretty much saturated the market at this point. They’re trying to find profitability in automation rather than adding tons of new stores.
You made a good point and I immediately thought that reporting a gross profit dollar amount as an example of how profit margins are not slim as simply inappropriate. And I would have responded myself if you hadn’t. There’s no single dollar figure that can inform anyone about anything useful about the profit margin of a business. A number without context is useless.
Gross profit can be defined as the profit a company makes after deducting the variable costs directly associated with making and selling its products or providing its services.
Flippant away
Yes, but there are many more expenses associated with running their business beyond simply COGS. Their net income last year was 11B, which is pretty average for a company that size.
Slim profit margins my ass. Walmarts gross profit for the twelve months ending July 31, 2024 was $163.786B,
Walmart has 10.5k locations. 163B divided by 10.5K is about $15.6M per location.
Jesus, in what world is $15M profits per store location considered a “slim margin”?
“Gross profit” is a meaningless number in this context. Their net income was $15.5B. If you do the same math to try to determine profit per location, ($15.5B/10500) it’s about $1.48M. Not bad, but still about 90% lower than your estimate.
Since I was already estimating seemingly random profit ratios, I also looked at their profit per employee, which came out to $7380/person ($15.5B/2.1M employees).
Unfortunately these numbers are also inclusive of, for example, Walmart’s e-commerce program, so calculating the profit per location doesn’t indicate anything meaningful to me, though I’m morbidly curious about what insights you are hoping to get from it?
Work in retail without e-ink and a lot of the concerns people have here already happen with paper. We do full store paper price tag updates daily, also someone will go around with a scanner making sure prices are up to date with website and print new sheets if not.
Normal days will consist of 3-5 new batches of tickets with the full store update batch containing normally ~10-20 a4 sheets. This isn’t a huge store either I imagine most wallmarts would have more products.
The prices already update super frequently and e-inks don’t really change that. It basically just cuts out the printing and placing, the person running around with the scanner now updates prices.
I think for workers they are nice as they reduce the chance of paper cuts and the back and leg pain from changing the 100s of bottom shelf tags.
The benefit for stores is they likely don’t need to hire as many people, less training and possibly reduced material cost over time as the paper would probably add up.
AFAIK, they use RFID now so they must be changed manually but maybe someday, they will devise a price-gouging scheme involving face detection and tracking people with security cameras.
“Here comes this lady that always buys four cans of dog food despite the last price increase! Let’s notch it up it by another 20%!”
They are also IR controlled. A lot of them have a little window on the front of the unit, and an array of transmitters in the ceiling.
Rightfully worried IMO
Haven’t digital price tags been used for decades? I’m sure these will be more high tech, but I remember ones like this at least 20 years ago
Yeah these have existed for a while.
I think the only thing new is that walmart previously talked about actually implementing “on demand pricing” and now that they’re adding digital price tags they could actually do it.
I think this will be potentially be a good thing (at first) as you won’t have people wasting their life away just endlessly walking around the store updating the price of every individual item for 40 hours a week.
Things will get messy when they start price gouging based on current inventory, weather, holidays or emergency situations.
Things will get deeply dystopian if they start scanning customers as they enter and change the price based on their skin color, gender, clothing, or estimated net worth.
