Walmart Just Announced a Major Update to Its Prices

Between its big expansion of new grocery items, as well as eliminating the self-checkout kiosks, it seems Walmart employees have their work cut out for them. There are a lot of tasks that need to get done in order for this major retailer to run smoothly, which is why the company recently announced another major change that could save employees a little more time: getting rid of its paper shelf price labels.

Walmart announced on Thursday, June 6, that the store plans on removing its paper shelf price labels in 2,300 of their stores by 2026. The plan is to replace these shelf labels with digital versions that will be able to automatically update prices on more than 120,000 items within minutes across the store. According to Walmart, these digital shelf labels (DSLs) will help to increase productivity for employees where price updates happen with a few clicks of a button instead of the excruciating two-day process it takes for an associate to update all of the labels.

The DSLs will also have a “stock to light” feature, making it easy for employees to locate where items are on shelves by using a signal from their mobile device. This not only helps for stocking shelves, but also locating items for customers that might be asking for locations. Plus, it makes it easier to fulfill online orders when locating an item is as easy as a click of a button. Plus, the DSLs are environmentally friendly. No more paper labels to get rid of if the entire store is digitized and easy to update with computers instead of wasteful paper.

Does this mean the prices on these digital labels will constantly be changing? As of right now, no. Even though the labels can update in under two minutes, the prices will stay as consistent as possible, meaning there will be no “dynamic pricing” where the price will change hour-by-hour based on the demand. Prices might update overnight, but they will stay the same throughout the day.