Overview
- USPTO granted Walmart two patents this year: a January filing for an end-to-end markdown system that can automatically update e-commerce prices and a patent last week for a machine-learning engine that forecasts demand and recommends prices.
- Walmart says the tools support markdowns and merchant decisions rather than surge or individualized pricing, stressing human oversight and asserting store prices remain consistent regardless of demand, time of day or shopper.
- Patent materials describe ingesting purchases, historical prices, payment methods and customer identifiers such as passport or driver’s license numbers, with schematics indicating potential use of third-party data.
- The company is installing electronic shelf labels in roughly half of its 4,600 U.S. stores and plans a chain-wide rollout within a year, prompting proposals from two U.S. senators to bar the technology in large grocers and union support for limits.
- State efforts are accelerating, with bills introduced in Maryland, Pennsylvania and Minnesota—Maryland’s governor backing a Protection from Predatory Pricing Act—while New York has enacted a related law and industry groups say evidence of aggressive dynamic pricing is limited.