The Rise of Digital Price Tags and Rightful Fear of the Costs
- SJ Williamson
- 6 days ago
- 5 min read
It's not often that I fondly remember my time as a cashier and customer service associate at CVS Pharmacy ten years ago. Most memories are from rude people in a rush, crazy couponers, a shift manager who took forever to balance the till at the end of the night, and elderly regulars who criticized my hair and make-up or tried to hang out with me outside of work. The few friends I had moved on before I could. It was not an easy job for me, despite the numerous customer-review awards I got for "having heart."
Lately, I find myself reliving Saturday nights at CVS while I am shopping for groceries. Each week, I'd rush to gather expired deal price tags for the trash and replace them with whatever deals would start that Sunday afternoon. It was a simple and easy part of my job; match the item code and item description to it's area on the shelf. But like many of my previous jobs in retail, it made me hyperaware of waste. The price tags from my store would easily fill up a small trash can each week, and multiply that by their hundreds of stores... it's a lot of paper and sticker waste. As usual, I was in no position to challenge it.
I remember thinking back then that it would be easier to just have digital price tags that changed each week. No paper waste. No time waste. No confusion over regular and deal prices. No ugly bright yellow tags hanging in the way of products on the shelves below. Easy. I expected this concept would never see the light of day; it was too efficient and not in-the-customer's-face enough. I was wrong.
Shopping Today
This year, big stores like Walmart have made what I thought was my dream come true with the release of digital price tags and signs instead of paper ones. But this is no longer my dream. The ease and accessibility I imagined was not the reason for this change; instead, the change paves the way for making more money off customers' confusion and using customer data to track us to kingdom come! It's always about making more money off of consumers, not improving our shopping experience. Here's how it works and might be revised in the near future.
The digital sign can show any price adjustments. These price adjustments aren't just changed weekly or even daily simply for new deals, but can be changed in seconds. Customers fear the application of dynamic pricing to necessities like groceries. Dynamic pricing (or price surging) might be more familiar to you in terms of purchasing flights. Airlines can use your digital data to raise or lower the price of plane tickets. Some retailers say they will not be using digital price signs for dynamic pricing. Apparently, Kroger already tried and ceased a pilot program in which they were using facial recognition cameras for dynamic pricing. Still, they are not promising that they will never turn to dynamic pricing and when they inevitably do, I highly doubt they'll be forthcoming with the news of it.
When Walmart first announced the digital signs, a quote from industry analyst Phil Lempert went viral:
If it's hot outside, we can raise the price of water and ice cream.
Lempert ends the quote with a more positive aspect like quick discounts on close to expiration date foods, but I feel that is just him trying to end on a positive note to make people overlook the negative aspect. Large chains like Walmart already take advantage of their poorly-paid employees (I was one and suffered because of it back in 2013). To think that they could now use our digital fingerprints (our phones through location and Bluetooth, our online patterns on their website, personal information required when you download the Walmart app to check prices yourself since the removal of price-checking machines, our faces through facial recognition software, and even our physical personhood through their security-coded "greeters" and check-out cameras) to charge us more for items that are already overpriced due to inflation and the tariffs passed on to us through Trump's orders is disgusting. It's just another reason to hate AI. Ever since, the yuck of digital signs and price tags has filled me with dread when I go grocery shopping. My dream became a nightmare in the hands of capitalism.
The Future of Price Tags
So far, only one state has banned dynamic pricing... I'm concerned that others aren't quickly following suit to protect consumers before they trust in large companies like Walmart that have found loopholes in the law and directly disobeyed laws before (that is from my personal experience and I'm sure many others who joined class-action lawsuits against them). Walmart executives are saying that the "labels do not interact with shoppers or collect personal information." Again, I feel like this information is misleading. Labels themselves may not interact with our personal information, but that does not mean that Walmart's store cameras, app, and website are not using our personal information to help train AI and lead to price gouging in more indirect or sneaky ways.
Being out in public is so stressful for me as a neurodivergent person. Slowly, the process of shopping became more and more stressful. I remember when they first got rid of self price-check machines at Walmart. My trust in things being the right price went down. Then they initiated self check-outs, which often process information slowly or malfunction, meaning some employee is in my personal space typing in passcodes to make sure I didn't accidentally steal a dollar's worth of corn tortillas. Recently at another store, a self check-out machine malfunctioned and an employee touched me; I almost lost my fucking shit. Then they move over to these digital price tags. My trust in price decreased even more. Then I think to myself, "What do I want more: to ask an employee to check the real price of the item, to not talk to anyone and hope it is right, or to need to cancel the purchase due to the price mislabel and have to talk to another employee while checking out? I never feel free. Pretty much all the time, I just want to quickly get something I need for a fair price and pay and not have to talk to anyone to find products, check out, or be checked on. You just can't do that anymore. I am so tired of our culture's pressing need for "helpful" technology being taken advantage of for third-parties to steal our information and use it against us for tracking and AI-assisted or mere dynamic pricing. This is not the land of the free I was taught to sing about in 3rd grade music class. I feel like a rat in a cage, and walking down the aisles with digital signs in the Walmart is my time on the hamster wheel, going nowhere.
That's why I can't shop in person at big stores anymore. I'm stuck at smaller stores, which come with their own issues of less product variety and sometimes higher prices. Still, it just isn't worth the anxiety... I hate how my dream has become a gateway for my nightmare.
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