Owens calls out Walmart for saying “one thing to investors, one thing to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, and another thing to consumers”
Today, Lindsay Owens, President and CEO of Groundwork Collaborative, appeared on CNN to set the record straight about Walmart’s pricing patents. In a report released this week, Owens and co-author Elizabeth Pancotti found that Walmart has spent years developing and filing patents for an arsenal of technology that could be used to charge higher prices based on items already in shoppers’ carts, offer more expensive products based on a family’s size, and set pricing based on user identity.
In the interview, which can be viewed in full HERE, Owens called on Walmart to withdraw its pending pricing patent applications, relinquish patent rights that have been granted for pricing technology, and submit to an independent audit:
“Walmart [says] one thing to investors, one thing to the United States Patent and Trademark Office, and a different thing to consumers. If Walmart wants to set the record straight at a time of high economic anxiety, as well as a time of high technological anxiety for families, it would be good for them to pull back all of their pending patent applications and say, ‘We made a mistake here. We’re not going to go forward with this type of technology,’ to relinquish their existing patents, and to get an independent audit from someone outside the company.”
Owens’ latest comments come as Walmart has mounted a furious attack on the pricing expert and consumer advocate, sparked by the release of her new book, Gouged: The End of a Fair Price–and What That Means for Your Wallet. Ahead of the book’s release, Walmart CEO John Furner went into cleanup mode in response to mounting backlash about the company’s pricing technologies, telling customers that the company will “price the product, not the person.” Walmart’s Executive Vice President of Corporate Affairs then issued a public letter responding to Owens’ revelations about the pricing and data collection patents the company has amassed. Owens’ research shows that Walmart has spent years developing technologies that can be used to track shoppers’ daily routines, measure customers’ heart rates and glucose levels, change prices in real-time based on what customers need most, and more.
MORE FROM OWENS:
In Bloomberg Businessweek: “For 150 years it has been the norm that if you and I were standing in line together, we would pay the same price. But that’s just not true anymore. Even though some of it is legal, it feels deeply unfair.”
On Morning Joe: “They’re trying to assess your willingness to pay, and this combines two things that Americans absolutely hate, understandably: being spied on and being ripped off. But this is no longer about the cost of making a good or bringing a good to market. This is about a new corporate credo. The right price is the one that they can get you to fork over.”
On the TODAY Show: “It seemed to me that price hikes were not random anymore, they started to feel rigged … This is coming for every line item in the household budget.”
On CNN with Audie Cornish: “Pricing used to be simple. How much does it cost to make something? Add a little bit of a profit margin on top, put a sticker on it, set it, and leave it. Not anymore. Today, pricing is a highly engineered science, and corporations are using new technologies to reach deeper into our wallets… This is coming for every line item in your household budget. We see algorithmic price fixing in the rental market. We see experiments like those my organization exposed at Instacart in the grocery aisle. And of course, the travel industry is one of the top culprits for this.”
On Jon Stewart’s The Weekly Show: “In the book, I’m really focused on the ways in which new technologies have allowed tech companies to supercharge these age-old impulses and reinvent the ripoff. And these days, you can get price fixing across industries and sectors where coordination would be impossible but for the players using a common algorithm.”
In the Daily Mail: “When you next log on to your favorite grocery app to order food for the week, you’ll probably assume the price you see on screen is the same price other shoppers will pay for their haul. You’d be wrong. Because, while you browse bunches of bananas and jars of peanut butter, an algorithm is probably hard at work running code, tracking every scroll and click, figuring out how high it can set your price tag before you change your mind and walk away.”
In The Guardian: “I think American shoppers are exhausted. High prices make shopping pretty treacherous. Adding insult to injury is the increasingly opaque manipulative and volatile way that corporate America does pricing. This reinvention of the rip-off that we’re all living through has undermined trust in one of the major ways we participate in the economy.”
In the Washington Post: “I think the rights and the protections that consumers have in the retail space have eroded considerably … and I don’t think our consumer laws have kept up. I don’t think that shoppers should be subjected to gouging as soon as they cross state lines. We do need federal standards. I think the 12 different rights outlined in the Shoppers’ Bill of Rights, taken together as a whole, would go a really long way to balancing the scales for shoppers in this country and would save us a lot of time and money.”