‘We won’t do it’: Walmart CEO vows not to use digital pricing to charge customers more based on income or shopping history

”We won’t do it,” Walmart Inc. President and Chief Executive Officer John Furner wrote in a September 25 letter to customers. He promised the company won’t look at your shopping history or how badly you need something and charge you more for it.

Surveillance pricing is when a store tracks your spending habits to set the price you pay. Regulators in Washington and New York are looking into it, but there’s no overarching rule for stores yet.

What Walmart is promising you

Walmart’s prices do fluctuate on a regular basis. Furner said they drop when Walmart saves on buying or shipping and inevitably go up when they need to pay more. It falls in line with the brand’s “Every Day Low Prices” approach, one Walmart has used for more than 60 years.

But the price shouldn’t change based on a person’s shopping habits.

“We price the product, not the person,” Furner wrote. In addition, he made three promises:

• You pay the same price as everyone else in the store, no matter who you are or what time you shop.
• Sparky, Walmart’s artificial intelligence (AI) shopping assistant, won’t change prices or hide a cheaper option.
• You choose whether to share extra personal details, and Walmart says it’ll be clear about how it uses them.

Why the little screens made people nervous

The screens save staff time. A store has over 120,000 items, and it would take days to change those paper tags by hand. It only takes minutes now, with the screen tags.

By March, about 2,300 U.S. Walmart stores already had them, and Walmart said every store would follow within a year.

However, that does little to assuage customers’ concerns. A price that’s easy to change is also easy to change for one person. Walmart says its labels don’t have cameras, microphones or facial recognition. It also says price changes usually go live outside shopping hours.

In December 2025, Consumer Reports, Groundwork Collaborative and More Perfect Union asked 437 volunteers to add the same groceries to their Instacart carts at the same time. Nearly three out of four items (74%) had different prices for different people. Some shoppers saw prices up to 23% higher. Instacart has since stopped those price tests.

Walmart wasn’t part of that study, though.

Where the rules stand right now

Furner’s letter came out the same day the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) stopped taking public comments on a draft policy about personalized pricing.

Don’t expect a ban, though. FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson said in August the agency doesn’t have the power to ”ban personalized pricing in all circumstances.” Instead, the draft warns that a business hiding how your data shapes a price could be breaking the law.

New York has a rule you can actually see. Since November 2025, most businesses that use your personal data to set a price have to say so right next to it, in these exact words: ”This price was set by an algorithm using your personal data.” Businesses that skip it can face a $1,000 penalty per violation.