Walmarts AI move could lead to surge pricing shoppers and experts are outraged: This isnt innovative, its exploitative

Walmart customers are slamming the retail giant for its new AI-powered pricing tool.Low prices could be in the rearview mirror at Walmart after it won two patents giving computer algorithms more of a role in product pricing.Last week, the retailer landed a patent for a demand forecast tool that’s designed to predict what shoppers will buy and recommend a price based on that.“Categories may include, for example, a food item, outdoor equipment, clothing, housewares, toys, workout equipment, vegetables, spices,” the filing noted, per Financial Times.The “demand forecasting and price recommendation” tool in the patent would use sources tied to a specific consumer, such as purchases, prices, methods of payment and customer ID, like a passport or driver’s license number.Walmart also obtained a patent in January for a system that “dynamically and automatically” updates item prices online based on product popularity.With these two programs together, customers could potentially see something similar to Uber-style surge pricing, such as beer prices rising before a big sports game, or essentials costs increasing before a major storm.The company has been granted nearly 50 US patents so far this year, according to records from the U.S.Patent and Trademark Office.Walmart said that both last week’s and January’s patents were “unrelated to dynamic pricing,” and that the patent issued at the start of 2026 was specifically for markdowns; the most recent, the company said, was designed to help merchant teams make decisions.“We don’t participate in surge pricing,” a spokeswoman said, per Financial Times.But alarm bells are still going off for experts and shoppers.“Dynamic pricing or anything that smells like it is playing with fire,” Matt Hamory, a grocery industry consultant at AlixPartners, told the Financial Times.He cited “the goodwill that you can lose by getting customers to think or suspect or worry even slightly that you are doing things wit...