The corporation is worth $833 billion, and on Monday it found itself quarrelling with a small Washington watchdog over what lies buried in its paperwork. Groundwork Collaborative, which had just been publicly accused by Walmart of misrepresenting its pricing practices, answered with documents: a report titled “The Walmart Watchtower: Patents Speak Louder Than Pledges,” laying out more than a dozen patents and applications the retailer holds — all of them, the group says, aimed at monitoring customers’ behavior, steering what they are shown, and determining what they pay. As Common Dreams reported, the exchange followed a month of damage control inside the world’s largest retailer.
Price the product, not the person
The quarrel began with a book. Lindsay Owens, Groundwork’s president and the author of Gouged: The End of a Fair Price—And What That Means for Your Wallet, had written about Walmart’s artificial intelligence-enabled pricing tactics, and last month CEO John Furner moved to calm the waters with a pledge: Walmart will “price the product, not the person.” Yet the company’s own executives have openly celebrated what their machines can do. Walmart US CEO Dave Guggina told investors in September that “when customers engage with Sparky, their average order value jumps 40%” — Sparky being the AI shopping assistant Walmart launched last year. One promise for the customers, Groundwork notes, another figure for the shareholders.
What the filings describe
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 profit—one that runs right through everyday consumers’ budgets.
That is Owens, and the report she released with Groundwork’s vice president Elizabeth Pancotti catalogs what the patents themselves describe. Technology patented by Walmart can estimate a child’s age from past purchases and steer families toward products and price points as the child grows. It can run pricing experiments on shoppers, nudging prices higher over time to learn how much they will bear. It can withhold coupons from customers judged willing to pay full price, change the price of an item according to what already sits in the cart, and tailor the price shown in online search results to a shopper’s history, address and other identifying traits — one customer charged $90 while another, for the same item, sees $110.
The applications on file go further. Walmart has sought technology that could read shoppers’ reactions to products through facial recognition, in-store cameras, Wi-Fi signals, even heart-rate or glucose data; that could monitor their social media activity before deciding whether they merit a coupon; that could track their daily routines — the children’s sports practices, the exercise classes, the commute, the visits to friends and relatives. “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. “Shoppers will have to decide whether to believe Walmart’s patent applications or its PR statements.”
The company’s letter
Walmart’s reply came from Dan Bartlett, its executive vice president of corporate affairs, in a public letter accusing Owens of “mischaracterizations.” “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,” Bartlett wrote. “We do not engage in dynamic pricing, raising prices in response to a hot afternoon or an approaching snowstorm, for example.” Groundwork, he said, had wrongly treated the patents “as evidence that we will pursue individualized or dynamic pricing,” when the company has “committed not to.”
Owens called any “confusion around Walmart’s pricing practices” a thing “of its own making.” “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. She asked the company to publish what data Sparky can see, how that information shapes its recommendations, and whether sensitive consumer information could be exposed or misused — a pointed question, she noted, given recent hacking incidents involving AI models. Walmart had not, as of the report’s release, offered that accounting.
“The arsenal of technologies the company is building that can be used to profile and track us should worry every American who is concerned about their privacy and pocketbooks,” Owens said. The patents, she argues, now let Americans decide for themselves whether to believe the denials. It is an old arrangement between the powerful and the public: the palace speaks, the ledgers are locked, and somewhere in between sits a filing cabinet that anyone patient enough can open.