In Walmart’s most direct response yet, the mass retailer’s executive vice president of corporate affairs is asking Groundwork Collaborative President and CEO Lindsay Owens to “correct the record” on alleged mischaracterizations regarding its pricing practices.
“Your recent public statements repeatedly mischaracterize Walmart’s pricing practices and use of technology,” Walmart’s Dan Bartlett said in a Monday letter directed at Owens, who leads the advocacy group. “They leave audiences believing Walmart uses or is preparing to use customers’ personal information or changes in the weather to charge them more. Your account does not accurately describe our practices or our plans.”
The executive reiterated that Walmart does not and will not use digital shelf labels for individual or dynamic pricing.
“The confusion around Walmart’s pricing practices is of its own making,” Owens said in a Monday statement responding to the letter. “Walmart says one thing in its damage-control letters to customers, another to its investors behind closed doors, and a different thing entirely to the United States Patent and Trademark Office.”
Groundwork Collaborative released a report highlighting several Walmart patents that feature various technological pricing capabilities. Some of the patents have been granted, including one about the remote controlling of electronic shelf labels granted in 2023. In the patent, Walmart said "the labels and prices may be changed in a dynamic fashion" based on what it knows about a shopper’s cart via scan-and-go technology.
“A patent isn’t a plan,” a Walmart spokesperson told Retail Dive when asked about this patent. “A digital shelf label isn’t a pricing strategy. This patent describes a possible use of technology; Walmart does not use, and will not use, digital shelf labels to change prices based on what’s in a shopper’s cart, who they are or the time of day. The patent has issued, but we will not use it or renew it.”
The patent’s adjusted expiration date is in April of 2039, according to the patent filing.
In his Monday letter, Bartlett said a patent describes an invention and potential capabilities. That “does not mean that Walmart has deployed a capability, used it with customers or decided to do so in the future,” he said.
The back-and-forth comes about a week after Walmart CEO John Furner released a statement aiming to dispel concerns that technologies such as digital shelf labels are being used to personalize pricing. The statement — which did not directly name Groundwork Collaborative or Owens — said Walmart prices “the product, not the person.”
Walmart is spending considerable resources to develop technology that could personalize pricing however, the Monday report from Groundwork Collaborative authored by Owens and Elizabeth Pancotti alleges.
“Corporations do not spend the time and money, or hire highly specialized staff, to develop and patent technology only to file it away on a hard drive never to enter a store or be coded into the back end of a website,” Owens and Pancotti’s report said.
Personalized and dynamic pricing has gained regulatory interest in the past year. The FTC has turned its attention to personalized pricing and Maryland became the first state in the country “to ban price manipulation practices driven by the ability to instantly spike prices based on surveillance data.”
Walmart’s low-price ethos is at odds with some of the disputed pricing practices, Ari Lightman, professor of digital media and marketing at Carnegie Mellon University’s Heinz College, told Retail Dive.
“Walmart has been known for the longest period of time for everyday low pricing,” Lightman said. “Which doesn't lend itself well to the idea of dynamic pricing.”
