Walmart has revealed that it is planning to move from paper shelf price labels to electronic shelf labels (ESLs) across nearly half of its 4,700 US stores by 2026.
The world’s largest retailer highlighted that the expanded rollout of ESLs to 2,300 sites would allow it to update prices on over 120,000 items within minutes.
The company noted that weekly updates to paper shelf labels typically took a store worker about two days. With digital labels, prices can be updated via a few clicks in its mobile app for workers called Me@Walmart.
The retailer stated that the new electronic labels would also enable workers to pick products for online orders faster.
Amid concerns that retailers could use digital shelf tags to introduce ‘dynamic pricing’, or surge pricing based on demand, Greg Cathey, senior VP of transformation and innovation at Walmart, said it had no plans to do that. “It is absolutely not going to be one hour it is this price and the next hour it is not,” he said on the sidelines of Walmart’s AGM in Bentonville, Arkansas, on Thursday.
Walmart spokesperson Cristina Rodrigues noted that suppliers typically provide pricing updates to Walmart weekly, but with digital price tags, they can pass on price changes to Walmart daily. She said that these prices are updated overnight, left the same during the day, and revisited again after store hours or before the store opens the next day.
In the UK, Lidl recently announced that it was making the switch to ESLs following the success of trials.
