Have you ever walked past the same shelf twice in a grocery store and wondered if the price tag changed? You might not be imagining things. A quiet transformation is happening in supermarkets across America, one that has lawmakers, consumer advocates, and everyday shoppers raising serious questions about the future of grocery shopping.
Electronic shelf labels, digital screens that display the price of an item, are replacing traditional paper price tags in grocery stores across America. These tiny digital screens are far more sophisticated than their paper predecessors. Walmart, the largest U.S. retailer, has said it plans to roll out electronic shelf labels to 2,300 stores by 2026, with the technology allowing employees to update shelf prices using a mobile app, reducing a price change that typically takes an associate two days to a matter of minutes. For shoppers who remember when prices stayed put for weeks, this shift feels unsettling. The question lingers: if prices can change in minutes, how do we know what we’re really paying?
The Technology Behind Real-Time Price Changes
Let’s be real, the technology powering these digital shelf labels is both impressive and slightly unnerving. The technology can already be found at Whole Foods, Amazon Fresh and Kroger, along with stores in Canada, Europe, Asia and other regions, and electronic shelf labels are expected to become more common: The global market for the products was estimated at $1.85 billion in 2024 and is projected to reach $7.54 billion by 2033. That dramatic growth tells you everything you need to know about where this is headed.
The new labels allow employees to change prices as often as every ten seconds. Think about that for a moment. Every ten seconds. Walmart says it used to take employees two days to change paper price labels on the 120,000 items it has in a typical store, with digital tags, it takes a few minutes. From a retailer’s perspective, this is revolutionary efficiency. From a shopper’s perspective? It opens the door to something far more controversial.
The Political Firestorm Over Surge Pricing Concerns
Politicians haven’t exactly remained quiet about this technological shift. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and then-Sen. Bob Casey, D-Pa., wrote in an August 2024 letter to Kroger’s then-chairman and CEO Rodney McMullen that digital price tags may enable Kroger and other grocery chains to transition to ‘dynamic pricing,’ in which the price of basic household goods could surge based on the time of day, the weather, or other transitory events, allowing stores to calibrate price increases to extract maximum profits. The concern isn’t theoretical. We’ve all experienced surge pricing with Uber rides or airline tickets, watching prices jump before our eyes.
Prominent lawmakers, including Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders as well as NYC Democratic mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, have raised alarms about “surge pricing” in grocery stores, likening the technology to price hikes seen in ride-sharing apps like Uber or dynamic airline ticketing, and there has also been legislation introduced to ban the labels in Arizona, Rhode Island and Maine. Here’s the thing though: groceries aren’t concert tickets. They’re necessities. The idea of paying more for milk during rush hour or eggs during a snowstorm strikes most people as fundamentally unfair, maybe even predatory.
What the Research Actually Reveals About Price Manipulation
Despite the political noise, researchers wanted hard evidence. A working paper co-authored by Rady economist Robert Sanders and University of Texas at Austin economist Ioannis Stamatopoulos analyzes over 180 million product-level observations before and after the introduction of electronic shelf labels, and the researchers find no evidence that ESLs have ushered in real-time pricing spikes, even during periods of high inflation. That’s actually pretty surprising, honestly. The technology exists to gouge customers, yet stores aren’t using it that way.
On a typical day, a given store saw a temporary price increase for 0.005 percent of its products before and 0.0056 percent of its products after it started using digital price labels, a nearly negligible difference, and price surging was basically nonexistent before electronic shelf labels, and it stayed nonexistent with the labels. The reasons behind this restraint are fascinating. Grocery stores make thin margins on individual items and rely heavily on customer loyalty, and raising prices unexpectedly, even on a single item, risks alienating shoppers and sending them to competitors. Retailers, it seems, understand that trust is more valuable than short-term profit squeezes.
The Future of Your Grocery Bill Hangs in the Balance
Still, just because retailers aren’t currently exploiting this technology doesn’t mean they never will. Overall, three quarters of all grocery items were offered at varying prices, and researchers told ABC News that Instacart has been using AI to run pricing experiments on millions of shoppers, testing how much stores can raise prices before customers remove an item from their cart or switch to another store. Companies are absolutely testing the limits of what consumers will tolerate.
A 2023 survey revealed that 52% of U.S. consumers associate dynamic pricing with price gouging, highlighting the reputational risks of perceived unfairness. That’s more than half of shoppers already viewing this technology with deep skepticism. The infrastructure is now in place for instant price changes across thousands of stores. What retailers choose to do with that power, and whether regulators step in to set boundaries, will determine whether your grocery bill stays predictable or becomes as volatile as an Uber fare on New Year’s Eve. The technology isn’t going away. How it gets used is still being decided, and honestly, that should make all of us pay closer attention every time we reach for that carton of milk.
