Siddharth Kavale
BENTONVILLE, Ark. (Reuters) – Paper price tags will disappear from thousands of Walmart (NYSE:) stores.
On Thursday, the company announced an expanded rollout of digital price tags that will allow it to update prices on more than 120,000 products within minutes.
It usually took a store employee about two days to update paper price tags on shelves each week. With digital labels, prices can be updated within two minutes with a few clicks in the Me@Walmart employee mobile app, the company says.
The new labels are small, square screens much like the paper labels they will replace. They will also allow workers to quickly select products to fulfill online orders, the company said in a statement.
Digital tags will hit shelves in 2,300 stores by 2026, said Greg Cathy, senior vice president of transformation and innovation at Walmart, which operates 4,700 U.S. stores.
How companies price products has become a hot-button issue recently after burger chain Wendy’s (NASDAQ:) came under fire on social media after its CEO suggested it might start testing “dynamic pricing” or sharp increasing prices depending on demand, especially during peak hours. day.
Cathy said Walmart has no plans to do that.
“It’s absolutely not going to be one hour, that’s the price, and the next hour it’s not,” he said Thursday on the sidelines of Walmart’s annual shareholder meeting in Bentonville, Arkansas.
Retailers typically provide price updates to Walmart weekly, but with digital price tags, they can communicate price changes to Walmart daily, said Walmart spokeswoman Christina Rodriguez.
Rodriguez said those prices are updated overnight, remain the same throughout the day and revert back to them after the store closes or before it opens the next day.