A new book by Lindsay Owens
The End of a Fair Price – and What That Means for Your Wallet
Available now
No matter how many letters @walmart writes, customers have every reason to worry they might be getting ripped off.
Their pricing patent applications speak louder than words: Walmart is building the tech they’d need to set personalized prices.
@danbartlett6 @owenslindsay1 You have a dynamic pricing patent that has a defined use for modify prices based on individuals. Saying your not going to us it to screw customers is like having a patent on a gun and promising that it won’t shoot bullets. Your customers aren’t as stupid as you think they are.
I think Walmart customers can make their own decisions. Do you trust a PR campaign from corporate execs meant to clean up a mess, or do you trust hundreds of patents that show where a company is investing time, money, and expertise?
Deployed or not, I don’t think any retailer should be developing tech that can use your Apple Watch or Omnipod to monitor your heart rate and blood sugar levels in the freezer aisle to see what your favorite ice cream flavor is.
For decades, an organized effort has reshaped the federal judiciary around a particular vision of economic power.
The result: weaker worker protections, less competition, & less tools to hold corporations accountable.
From @WeDemandJustice & @Groundwork https://demandjustice.org/oligarchy/
Some Democrats worry investigating corporate America will look like retribution. That's bad policy and bad politics. Congress has hauled in corrupt CEOs since Teapot Dome.
@Groundwork Senior Fellow and investigations veteran Molly Claflin in @MSNOWNews:
You can believe @walmart's letter "promising" not to use deceptive pricing practices, or you can believe the patent applications they've filed to do just that.
Walmart might not be telling you what they're up to, but they have been telling the US Patent & Trademark Office.
And here it is. @Walmart, I'm ready to talk.
I love that Walmart states emphatically that they price products not people, then tries to explain away a patent that literally says "if a customer has tuna fish, they may be offered a different price on mayonnaise." Go @owenslindsay1
Don’t take our word for it: Walmart has spilled all the details to the US Patent and Trademark office.
Receipts here:
Some of the most insidious tech developments include:
- The ability to weigh your car in the parking lot to determine how much you bought or read your license plate to see where your car is registered, and thus, how far you drove to a Walmart store
- A “Karen-o-meter” to decide
If you think Flock is bad, just wait until you see what data Walmart has figured out how to collect and exploit.
We found evidence that Walmart has developed technology that can:
- Deanonymize cell phone data to track customers well outside of stores
- Use customers’ heart rate
Walmart swears up and down it’s not deploying personalized pricing. Yet when we dug into hundreds of patents it’s filed over the past decade, we found that the retail giant is developing incredibly invasive technology for one purpose: padding its bottom line.
My response to @Walmart:
For years McDonald's executives have been bragging to Wall Street about their AI price-setting technology ... until Reuters called them out just last week.
Americans don’t need AI pricing systems sizing them up to supersize their drive-thru bill. It's time to end the rip off.
After Reuters exposed McDonalds as using AI to raise prices, the company insisted that “AI does not set the price of a Big Mac,” but its executives have spent years telling Wall Street the opposite.
McDonald’s should pull the plug on its pricing engine & end the McRipoff.
