Walmart Denies ‘Surveillance Pricing’ Plans After Watchdog Flags Its Patents
The Groundwork Collaborative released a report cataloging more than 300 Walmart patents it says could enable personalized pricing. Walmart's corporate affairs chief responded with an open letter insisting a patent 'isn't a plan' — and the retailer says it won't use the disputed technology.
Walmart and the progressive think tank Groundwork Collaborative are locked in a public fight over whether the nation’s largest retailer is building the infrastructure to charge shoppers different prices based on their personal data — a practice economists call “surveillance pricing.”
The dispute erupted Oct. 5, when Groundwork released a report titled “The Walmart Watchtower: Patents Speak Louder Than Pledges,” authored by its CEO and president Lindsay Owens and vice president of policy, advocacy, and research Elizabeth Pancotti. After reviewing more than 300 Walmart patents, Owens argues the company has patented technology that could adjust prices for individual shoppers based on their personal information — and that executives describe those capabilities in far more ambitious terms to investors than to customers.
The report spotlights one patent in particular: U.S. patent US11687872B2, filed in 2018 and granted in 2023, for a “system and method for remote controlling of electronic shelf labels.” According to Gizmodo, the patent describes labels whose prices “may be changed in a dynamic fashion” — for example, if a shopper’s cart contains tuna fish, “they may be offered a different price for mayonnaise,” or prices could vary with supply and demand.
Walmart’s answer: a patent isn’t a plan
Walmart responded the same day. Dan Bartlett, the company’s executive vice president of corporate affairs, published an open letter to Owens — posted on X and Walmart’s website — asking her to “correct the record.”
“The facts are straightforward. We price products, not people,” Bartlett wrote, according to The Shelby Report. “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. We do not engage in dynamic pricing, raising prices in response to a hot afternoon or an approaching snowstorm, for example.”
On patents, Bartlett wrote that a patent describes an invention and its potential capabilities, “not that Walmart has deployed a capability, used it with customers or decided to do so in the future.” Addressing the tuna-and-mayonnaise example, he wrote: “Putting tuna in a customer’s cart does not cause Walmart to charge that customer more for mayonnaise. We do not do that, and we will not.”
The letter also addressed Sparky, Walmart’s AI shopping assistant, which Owens has connected to higher customer spending. Bartlett wrote that higher average order values do not establish that customers were charged higher prices for the same items, and that information shared with Sparky “is not used to raise their individual prices.”
A second round of patents
Owens responded with a new statement on Oct. 5, releasing additional analysis of Walmart patents so, as she put it, Americans can decide for themselves. “Walmart says one thing in its damage-control letters to customers, another to its investors behind closed doors, and a different thing entirely to the United States Patent and Trademark Office,” she said, according to coverage by Gizmodo. Owens appeared on CNN on Oct. 7 to press the case that the company should set the record straight for customers.
The report also cites Walmart CEO David Guggina’s statement that “when customers engage with Sparky, their average order value jumps 40%,” raising questions from Groundwork about what the AI assistant is optimized to do.
The fight comes as scrutiny of personalized pricing intensifies nationwide. Maryland’s first-in-the-nation ban on surveillance-based dynamic pricing took effect Oct. 1, and Walmart CEO John Furner pledged in September that the company would not use personalized pricing. RetailDive reported that Walmart will not deploy or renew the disputed scan patent — a concrete concession, though Owens and other critics say the fine print of the company’s patent portfolio still deserves a close look.
At issue is a distinction both sides acknowledge matters: a patent documents an idea, not a business plan. What remains contested is whether Walmart’s extensive patenting in pricing technology — which no one disputes is real — signals a direction the company might eventually take, and whether shoppers should believe corporate pledges that it won’t.
Reporting based on coverage by Gizmodo and The Shelby Report.
