Groundwork’s Lindsay Owens’ New Corporate Pricing Exposé Already Landing Blows, Forcing Walmart to Do Cleanup

Groundwork’s Lindsay Owens’ New Corporate Pricing Exposé Already Landing Blows, Forcing Walmart to Do Cleanup

Walmart CEO scrambles to reassure shoppers after Groundwork CEO exposes retail giant’s high-tech playbook for gouging consumers in new book

Days before the publication of Groundwork’s President and CEO Lindsay Owens’ book Gouged – an exposé of corporate pricing tricks and tactics – Walmart’s CEO John Furner released an open letter to shoppers in response to Owens’ sharp criticisms of Walmart’s AI-enabled pricing tactics. From openly bragging on corporate earnings calls to filing detailed patent applications, Walmart has made clear its AI shopping assistants and electronic shelf labels are designed to jack up prices based on shoppers’ personal data. Furner issued the letter on the heels of Owens’ appearance on Jon Stewart’s The Weekly Show podcast and her recent testimony before the United States Senate, where she unveiled shocking new research into Walmart’s patents.

Lindsay Owens, Groundwork Collaborative President and CEO, shared the following:

“Make no mistake – Walmart’s CEO is cleaning up his spill on aisle four. Walmart executives have spent months bragging to shareholders about how Sparky is boosting the company’s bottom line by getting customers to spend more. Worse, the company has spent years developing and patenting technology that is specifically designed to vary prices based on consumers’ behavior and demand. Walmart wouldn’t spend the time, effort, and money to develop and deploy these technologies unless it padded their profits.”

“Furner can backtrack all he wants, but Walmart has already pulled back the curtain on its sneaky pricing practices, and shoppers aren’t buying it. If Walmart is serious about its commitments to shoppers, it should pull the patent filings, clawback the electronic shelf labels, and make Sparky work for customers, not for Walmart.”

Background 

• Earlier this year, Walmart announced it would transition from paper price tags to electronic shelf labels in all of its U.S. stores by the end of 2026. These digital price labels can change prices up to six times per minute, based on the weather, time of day, or even which customer is in front of them.
• Walmart was granted a patent in 2023 for technology that can remotely deploy dynamic price changes to electronic shelf labels. The patent filing specifically says that prices “may be varied based on what items are already in [a customer’s] cart, e.g., if a customer has tuna fish, they may be offered a different price for mayonnaise.”
  • The patent filing goes on to say that “prices may also be varied in a dynamic manner based on the supply of the product, low supply+high demand = change in price.”
• In a February earnings call with investors, Furner claimed that Walmart shoppers who use Sparky, the company’s AI shopping assistant, spend 35% more on transactions than shoppers who do not. In September, Dave Guggina, President and CEO of Walmart U.S., told investors “when customers engage with Sparky, their average order value jumps 40%.”
• In 2024, Walmart acquired TV-maker Vizio, gaining the ability to merge data on what ads consumers watch with what they buy in their stores and on their website.