Walmart rolls out digital prices

Electronic price labels lining the shelves are the next big thing in retail — maybe you’ve already seen them at your local Kroger or Best Buy. Walmart recently announced it will roll the feature out at all its U.S. locations within the next year.

The average Walmart Supercenter is nearly 180,000 square feet, bigger than three football fields. And it carries something like 120,000 items, each with its own price.

“Think about the amount of labor hours it takes to go and change the labels with stickers,” said Joe Feldman, a retail analyst at Telsey Advisory Group.

Electronic price labels replace manual labor with the click of a button. And Feldman said there are other time-saving advantages. Workers can use an app to identify shelves that need attention.

“It could, you know, light up in a different color or flash or something and would notify employees that they need to be restocking this particular item or that particular item,” Feldman said.

Electronic prices will allow Walmart to not just change prices more easily, but whenever it wants. The company says it will only do this outside of shopping hours, so the cost of toothpaste can’t go up between when you grab it from the shelf and when you check out.

Still, commodities like eggs, meat, and coffee fluctuate daily, said Phil Lempert, a food industry analyst.

“We’ve got lots of disruption whether it’s about labor, whether it’s about fuel. And as a result those costs are going to go up,” Lempert said.

Walmart also says it will not use digital stickers for surveillance pricing — when different prices are set for each individual based on their data. But Lempert thinks this is where retail is going.

“Once that technology is on the shelf, who knows,” he said.

Consumers are wary of these features, so companies have to be careful with how they roll them out, said John Zhang, a marketing professor at Wharton.

“If Walmart wants to do this well, they have to do it in steps,” Zhang said.

A little consumer education. A lot of positive PR.

“You could actually do better promotions. You can set better prices,” he added.

It could get consumers more comfortable with the idea that electronic stickers can mean prices could easily go up, but they could also go down.