Walmart customers are slamming the retail giant for its new AI-powered pricing tool.
Low prices could be in the rearview mirror at Walmart after it won two patents giving computer algorithms more of a role in product pricing.
Last week, the retailer landed a patent for a demand forecast tool that’s designed to predict what shoppers will buy and recommend a price based on that.
“Categories may include, for example, a food item, outdoor equipment, clothing, housewares, toys, workout equipment, vegetables, spices,” the filing noted, per Financial Times.
The “demand forecasting and price recommendation” tool in the patent would use sources tied to a specific consumer, such as purchases, prices, methods of payment and customer ID, like a passport or driver’s license number.
Walmart also obtained a patent in January for a system that “dynamically and automatically” updates item prices online based on product popularity.
With these two programs together, customers could potentially see something similar to Uber-style surge pricing, such as beer prices rising before a big sports game, or essentials costs increasing before a major storm.
The company has been granted nearly 50 US patents so far this year, according to records from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.
Walmart said that both last week’s and January’s patents were “unrelated to dynamic pricing,” and that the patent issued at the start of 2026 was specifically for markdowns; the most recent, the company said, was designed to help merchant teams make decisions.
“We don’t participate in surge pricing,” a spokeswoman said, per Financial Times.
But alarm bells are still going off for experts and shoppers.
“Dynamic pricing or anything that smells like it is playing with fire,” Matt Hamory, a grocery industry consultant at AlixPartners, told the Financial Times.
He cited “the goodwill that you can lose by getting customers to think or suspect or worry even slightly that you are doing things with pricing that are to your benefit and their detriment.”
On top of those patents, Walmart is rolling out digital shelf labels across its stores to replace the traditional paper price tags, allowing the electronic displays to update in real-time, making price changing easier and quicker than ever.
More than 2,300 locations in the US already use the instant label, and the company plans to expand the system chain-wide within the next year.
Critics have said the electronic labels could be “used to mislead consumers in the future by changing prices too often or in confusing ways,” the Retail Industry Leaders Association said, noting that “fears about widespread misuse tend to remain hypothetical.”
Walmart said that the new labels are meant to make it easier to update prices rather than manually replacing thousands of paper labels, adding that store prices were “consistent regardless of demand, time of day or who is shopping.”
“Price updates are still people-led and support Walmart’s Everyday Low Price promise,” the company added.
The AI-driven pricing tools, along with the automatic digital labels, have sparked concerns with customers who shop at Walmart for its low prices and already struggle with the increased cost of living.
“Capitalism breeds innovation, and the innovation is dynamically price gouging people based on how much they need something,” one person said.
“This isn’t innovative, it’s exploitative,” another wrote.
“Oh this is not going to go well at all,” someone commented.
However, consumer expert Bob Phibbs told the Daily Mail that the change isn’t as novel as it seems to be.
“Every retailer already does this with a spreadsheet and a gut feeling. Walmart just automated it,” he said. “Prices can drop just as fast as they rise.”
This story originally appeared on NYPost
