Key Points
Walmart is rolling out digital shelf labels and expects the technology to be in all U.S. stores by year’s end. Kroger also has begun experimenting with the technology.
The nation’s largest retailer says the digital price tags help associates do their jobs better and stresses that prices on items will be exactly the same for every consumer in every store.
Some legislators are wary of the technology’s potential to be used in dynamic pricing models that disadvantage consumers, with Sens. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) and Ben Ray Luján (D-N.M.) introducing a bill to ban it.
There is legal obligation to honor the shelf tag if it says a product should be lower than what it rang up for. Otherwise it’s essentially a bait and switch, and can usually get a store in trouble if a customer complains to the right people.
At the federal level (in the USA at least), there isn’t. Some states might, no law covering the entire nation.
The legal barrier for “bait and switch” is higher than that. Bait and switch is if the price is intentionally lowered and advertised, then raised or not offered when the customer tries to buy. If a customer took one of these “expired shelf tag” situations to court, the retailer could easily point to their sale promo from the week before showing the price was valid at that time, but that the old shelf tag hadn’t been properly taken down. The retailer would win, but the retailer knows this too and the cost of legal representation, bad press, and losing a customer usually isn’t worth winning the legal argument, so they usually just honor the mistakenly lower price and move on.