“Walmart’s own investments and patents suggest that the retail giant is building a vast arsenal of tools that can be used to track shoppers and even potentially determine what they pay,” Groundwork Collaborative states. (Photo Illustration by Sheldon Cooper/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
Walmart finds itself at the center of a growing debate over retail practices around pricing, consumer data collection and privacy. Groundwork Collaborative, the progressive consumer advocacy group, has just issued an investigative report that argues Walmart’s portfolio of technology patents could not only enable personalized pricing but support a level of consumer surveillance that goes far beyond traditional retail practices. Walmart insists it prices products not people. But the privacy implications of the technology raise questions that the company has yet to fully address.
Founding Principles
Price has always been retail’s most powerful lever to attract customers and keep them coming back. Sam Walton understood this better than anyone. When he opened the first Walmart store in 1962, he built the business on a simple principle—Every Day Low Price—a promise that has defined the brand ever since.
That principle powered Walmart’s to become the world’s largest retailer, as well as the world’s largest private employer with $692 billion in revenues, nearly 11,000 stores and some 2.1 million employees across 20 countries. That size and scale carries great responsibility—economic, political and cultural— and it gives context to Walton’s statement of the company’s purpose: “If we work together, we’ll lower the cost of living for everyone…we’ll give the world an opportunity to see what it’s like to save and have a better life.”
However, its corporate responsibility now collides with a new reality: technology is resetting the traditional retail pricing structure. Digital shelf labels, advanced data-driven backend systems and AI tools are changing how prices are set, adjusted and communicated.
And the rapid advance of pricing technology is causing concern among shoppers—and rising alarm for consumer advocates. Groundwork Collaborative CEO Lindsay Owens puts it bluntly: “The transparency and predictability of the price tag is an endangered species.”
Owens argues that printed price tags have worked well in retail for over a century by providing shoppers predictable reference points for budgeting, comparison shopping and understanding value. But she warns that emerging pricing technologies threaten that foundation.
“The reason that the price tag is under attack is new technologies that companies are developing to make pricing more volatile, to make pricing more personal, and to make pricing more focused on how much you’re willing to pay and less tethered to the underlying cost,” she shared with me.
Walmart In The Crosshairs
Owens is escalating the pricing debate with the publication of her new book, Gouged: The End of a Fair Price—and What That Means for Your Wallet, which argues that Walmart and hundreds of other companies are using deceptive pricing practices. On Amazon, the book is currently the number one new release in economic policy and development and number two in money and monetary policy.
The book’s release coincided with Groundwork’s introduction of a proposed “Shoppers’ Bill of Rights”—a legislative framework for new consumer protections. Anticipating the exposure of Walmart, CEO John Furner made a preemptive move to shape the narrative around its pricing policies in an open letter to customers on September 25, which I reported here.
Groundwork has now escalated its critique with a detailed report on Walmart’s technology investments toward building a complex infrastructure for customer surveillance that could be activated with the proverbial flip of the switch for personalized pricing.
“Walmart’s own investments and patents suggest that the retail giant is building a vast arsenal of tools that can be used to track shoppers and even potentially determine what they pay,” the report states, pointing to Walmart’s recently updated customer privacy policy. The policy runs more than 7,000 words—a level of detail few consumers will ever read.
Privacy Concerns
Walmart collects the standard consumer data any retailer needs—names, addresses, purchase and payment history. But Groundwork argues that the company gathers far more sensitive personal information, crossing into what Owen calls an “extreme approach to surveillance.” This includes:
- Online activity: account details, browsing behavior and search history
- Expanded demographic data: age, gender, citizenship, ethnicity, date of birth, family or marital status, household income, education, employment information, family health, number of children, number of cars owned, and software or virtual assets owned.
- Geolocation tracking: location of a shopper’s device, including precise location in the store
- Biometric information: iris or retina imagery, face geometry, fingerprints
- Sensory information: audio and visual recordings, photographs used for virtual try-ons
- Algorithmic inferences: predicted preferences, behaviors and even willingness to pay
Walmart also notes that it “may combine and associate personal information collected or inferred about you from multiple online and in-store sources”— including, but not explicitly limited to, companies within the Walmart corporate family.
The scope of data sharing raises additional questions. Data related to shipping, billing and payment processing is expected to be shared. But Walmart’s policy allows consumer information to spread much wider: to marketplace sellers, advertisers, publishers, social media platforms, ad-tech firms, data-management vendors, analytics companies and suppliers, who can purchase aggregated behavioral insights.
“Walmart has amassed the most intimate information about its customers and is developing the technology that can be used to put that data to work at checkout,” Owens said.
Shopper Surveillance Technology
Groundwork’s report, “The Walmart Watchtower: Patents Speak Louder than Pledges,” details 14 advanced technology patents the company holds or has applied for—complete with links to the patent filings.
The group argues many of these patents could enable surveillance or personalized pricing, like the 2023 patent that can change prices in a shopper’s smart cart when they use the “Scan & Go” app. The patent states: “If a customer has tuna fish, they may be offered a different price for mayonnaise.”
However, other patents go far beyond traditional retail data collection. For example, one patent covers technology that can unmask anonymous cell phone data after visiting a store to reveal where a shopper lives, how they commute and the restaurants they visit. Another describes a system that can map a customer’s daily routines—work schedules, kids’ sports practices, gym classes, social get-togethers—by pulling from GPS signals, surveillance cameras, social media posts and traffic cameras.
Importantly, Groundwork does not cite any examples of Walmart using these technologies to personalize prices for individual customers and Walmart has repeatedly stated that is “prices products, not people.”
Nonetheless, Owens looks at the scope of the data collected and the range of the patents and asks the logical question:
“Walmart has amassed the most intimate information about its customers and is developing the technology to put that data to work at checkout. Shoppers will have to decide whether to believe Walmart’s patent applications or its PR statements.”
Walmart Responds
Upon release of Groundwork’s report on patents, Dan Bartlett, Walmart executive vice president of corporate affairs, issued a letter to Owens stating emphatically that she mischaracterizes Walmart’s pricing practices and urges her to set the record straight.
“Your account does not accurately describe our practices or our plans,” he stated. “Work presented as research carries a basic responsibility to distinguish evidence from speculation and potential technology capability from actual business practices. Your descriptions of Walmart repeatedly blur those distinctions, giving people a misleading picture of what they pay and why.”
Bartlett invited Owens to meet and she said that she is open to the conversation. However, no meeting has been scheduled yet.
Unanswered Questions
Frankly, I take Bartlett at his word when he says, “Our business is built on trust,” and he adds, “Walmart does not and will not use an individual customer’s personal information, income, shopping history, urgency or willingness to pay to set an individualized price.”
To raise prices for one customer and lower them for another would violate the company’s foundational principles of Every Day Low Price and erode the trust Walmart has spent more than 60 years building. On the question of personalized pricing, Walmart’s position is clear and unequivocal.
But neither Bartlett’s letter nor CEO Furner’s earlier open letter directly addresses the broader privacy concerns—including whether Walmart could license its patented technologies to others. Walmart may not use these tools to personalize prices, but others could. And the patents themselves describe capabilities far beyond what Walmart says it intends to do.
“Corporations don’t spend years building high-tech pricing tools, hiring experts, and filing patents just to let them collect dust. They do it because they see a path to higher profits,” Owens stated.
That unresolved gap—between Walmart’s assurances on pricing and the sheer scope of the technologies its developed—is where the privacy issues remain unanswered. And it’s where Owens believes consumer anxiety is growing.
“Americans are concerned about rising prices right now and they also understandably have a lot of anxiety about new technologies given the rise of AI,” Owens concluded. “What we have here is the intersection of the Venn diagram—concern about rising prices and concern about the scope and scale and the force of new technologies in the Walmart checkout line. That’s why it’s ticking a nerve and I think Walmart needs to do a lot more than pen open letters to reassure consumers, like closing its technology lab.”
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