Comment on Walmart's use of digital price tags signal the future of retail shopping, but consumers are worried
TachyonTele@lemm.ee 2 months ago
It’s bound to happen. Why waste hours replacing tags when you can just change what the shelf says when the prices change.
Slim profit margins my ass. Walmarts gross profit for the twelve months ending July 31, 2024 was $163.786B,
Not to sound flippant, but do you know what gross profit means? They aren’t pocketing all of that. Walmart’s net profit margin is 2.66%, which is minuscule. They make up for that by having enormous volume.
A measly $3.2b. Can hardly afford a new yacht with that!
That’s an expected tradeoff of operating an essential service is the point. It’s not as though their margin is that slim by mistake, or out of goodwill, or bad business sense. It’s meant to lead to the situation where we shop at Walmart not by choice, but in lieu of other options.
Not really — it’s because nearly everything they sell is highly fungible, and they compete on price. Nobody is willing to pay a premium to shop at Walmart. Twenty years ago you’d have been correct, but they’ve pretty much saturated the market at this point. They’re trying to find profitability in automation rather than adding tons of new stores.
I’m really meaning the lack of option not to consume fast-moving consumer goods, rather than the option to pay a premium for them elsewhere. When their market position is similar to like an outlet for government rations except for private profit, their net is essentially what was skimmed off the top of free enterprise. 2.66% is just the current maximum amount that is justifiably worth without doing societal harm
You made a good point and I immediately thought that reporting a gross profit dollar amount as an example of how profit margins are not slim as simply inappropriate ad would have responded myself if you hadn’t. There’s no single dollar figure that can inform anyone about the profit margin of a business. A number without context is useless.
Gross profit can be defined as the profit a company makes after deducting the variable costs directly associated with making and selling its products or providing its services.
Yes, but there are many more expenses associated with running their business beyond simply COGS. Their net income last year was 11B, which is pretty average for a company that size.
I’ll be completely honest. I don’t care anywhere near enough about the actual number that you do. I looked it up, and that was that. I didn’t write a financial report.
Slim profit margins my ass. Walmarts gross profit for the twelve months ending July 31, 2024 was $163.786B,
Walmart has 10.5k locations. 163B divided by 10.5K is about $15.6M per location.
Jesus, in what world is $15M profits per store location considered a “slim margin”?
“Gross profit” is a meaningless number in this context. Their net income was $15.5B. If you do the same math to try to determine profit per location, ($15.5B/10500) it’s about $1.48M. Not bad, but still about 90% lower than your estimate.
Since I was already estimating seemingly random profit ratios, I also looked at their profit per employee, which came out to $7380/person ($15.5B/2.1M employees).
Unfortunately these numbers are also inclusive of, for example, Walmart’s e-commerce program, so calculating the profit per location doesn’t indicate anything meaningful to me, though I’m morbidly curious about what insights you are hoping to get from it?
thurstylark@lemm.ee 2 months ago
I think the main concern is that this is a step towards normalizing extremely frequent price changes, a la Uber surge pricing.
YurkshireLad@lemmy.ca 2 months ago
That’s exactly what this is. All stores will eventually do this and prices will fluctuate throughout the day.
solsangraal@lemmy.zip 2 months ago
isn’t it pretty much what amazon’s been doing since the beginning? the difference being there’s no “app” like camel yet to track prices over time at a single store
but yea, still another reason not to go to walmart. how do they mitigate the problem of something being $X when you put it in your cart, and the price being X+whatever by the time you get through the 2 mile long line at one of the 2 open registers?
Tabzlock@lemmy.ml 2 months ago
Paper ticket stores already do this, its just a more work for the workers than e-ink.
floofloof@lemmy.ca 2 months ago
And personalized pricing, based on your profile and what they think they can get you to pay.
t3rmit3@beehaw.org 2 months ago
I can’t wait for them to get sued into the ground because their AI is changing prices based on skin color.
HobbitFoot@thelemmy.club 2 months ago
Well, that’s what coupons are for.
spizzat2@lemm.ee 2 months ago
So, if I grab an item off the shelf and browse around the store for a while, is the price going to be the price currently displayed or the price when I grabbed it?
If it’s the current price, what’s the point of a price tag? If I can’t actually know the price until checkout, then showing me the price is kind of a useless bit of data. I also suspect that the “speak to a manager” types would make that a major headache for stores.
If it’s the price when I grabbed it, how are they keeping track of that? I see two ways of handling that: one requires that you use their app to shop, and the other requires cameras and “machine vision” that are still unreliable, at best. The former seems more likely, but I doubt either is going to sit well with customers.
I haven’t seen that aspect addressed in any articles about the “feature”.
Tabzlock@lemmy.ml 2 months ago
Take a photo of it, I work with paper but we change our tags frequently. We often have prices changed when a customer reaches checkout. I’ve also had times where a customer came back to check a shelf tag after I just updated it. I honored the previous price those times as I was still holding the tickets but its not a guarantee even in paper stores.
Fuzzy_Red_Panda@lemm.ee 2 months ago
I know this isn’t your fault or anything but damn, that seems lightly customer hostile at best, and deeply unethical at worst. It sounds like it should be illegal.
hitmyspot@aussie.zone 2 months ago
Its not that it can’t happen now. Its that it will happen all the time with digital tags.
Nollij@sopuli.xyz 2 months ago
Even at stores that have this feature, I rarely see people use it. It’s clearly not an experience that people flock to.
OTOH, on the rare occasion I’ve visited a Walmart in the past 10 years, I have a 100% rate of checkout taking an absurdly long time. Everyone there just seems to accept it like they have no choice.
tangentism@beehaw.org 2 months ago
It will become an Olympic event where you have to get from the shelf to the till before the price changes!
TachyonTele@lemm.ee 2 months ago
I edited in another thought. I agree with that fear, that’s obviously the concern. I didn’t feel the need to repeat it.