Walmart serves 280 million shoppers a week and churned out more than $22 billion in profit in the last fiscal year. So, suffice it to say, I was floored – and maybe even a bit flattered – when the retail behemoth issued not one but two public responses in just over a week to the warnings I’ve made to shoppers about the retailer’s new surveillance pricing and price-gouging technologies in my new book and in recent interviews.

In an open letter to customers from the CEO , followed by a letter from the company’s top PR executive addressing me directly, Walmart insists that it “price[s] products, not people” and argues that building technological capacity is not the same as deploying it.

But here’s the problem: Walmart’s public assurances tell a very different story from the one buried in its patent filings. Walmart is pouring resources into developing and protecting the technology it needs to create intimate shopper profiles and use that data to shape what consumers pay.

This week, our organization, Groundwork Collaborative, released a stunning analysis of more than 10 years of Walmart’s patent filings. Our research reveals a sprawling arsenal of technologies capable of tracking shoppers and building extraordinarily detailed profiles of them. That includes apps, electronic shelf labels, and surveillance cameras that can instantly change prices and offers based on your in-store and online behavior, assumed personality, and even the specifics of your car.

Corporations don’t make these kinds of investments intending to let their new inventions gather dust. They do it when they believe they can earn a significant return by putting new technologies to work and leveraging them to pad their bottom lines. As many Americans are already stretched thin amid a punishing affordability crisis, this should deeply concern shoppers who care about their privacy and pocketbooks.

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Spy Apps And Surveillance Cameras

By Walmart’s own account, collecting personal data is central to its pricing power and could help the company set and personalize offers. For example, the head of the company’s in-house retail ad platform recently called the personal information gleaned by the company’s AI shopping assistant “gold” for steering product recommendations.

These surveillance and pricing technologies work best when shoppers don’t know about them. If you can’t tell that you’re being shown a higher price than the person next to you in the checkout line, or that a coupon was withheld because the company predicted you’d buy an item anyway, then the retailer can pad their profits without ever tipping you off or riling you up.

To date, that playbook has largely worked. Most consumers are unaware of the sheer breadth and granularity of data that corporations like Walmart collect, analyze, and file into detailed consumer profiles. Walmart, for example, quietly updated its customer privacy notice in August, broadening the data it can collect and analyze to include everything from retinal imagery and demographic information to income and license plate numbers. The company even asserts the right to follow shoppers aisle by aisle, pinpointing their exact location throughout the store, noting in its terms that it “may be able to recognize the location of your mobile device in [the] store” and “[it] may collect precise geolocation information.”

Walmart argues that a patent is not deployment, and I don’t dispute that. But patents are road markers of where a company is headed. They show what a company has invested in and considers valuable enough to protect. Walmart shoppers deserve to know the extent of the technology that could soon shape their shopping experience. Consider a few examples that we uncovered during our deep dive into Walmart’s patent filings:

Through the ‘Scan & Go’ tool in Walmart’s app, customers can ring up items as they walk the store. This convenience could come at a cost: In 2023, Walmart was granted a patent for a technology that can change the prices of your family’s weekly grocery haul based on what is already in your cart. The patent application explains how, based on the data collected by the Scan & Go tool, “labels and prices may be changed in a dynamic fashion.” In the company’s own example, a shopper who puts tuna in their cart could be charged more for mayonnaise by the time they reach the condiment aisle — because Walmart’s tech predicts they’re making tuna salad and knows what they need.

Changing shelf prices in real time hinges on electronic shelf labels, or the little screens rapidly replacing the classic paper price tags. These labels can adjust prices up to six times a minute and connect directly to retailers’ software systems, allowing companies to push new prices to the shelf nearly instantaneously. Walmart is rapidly rolling out these tags — it plans to have them in its U.S. stores by the end of the year — arming the retailer with the power to change the price between the time you grab the item you need and the time you reach checkout, potentially without you ever realizing it.

Walmart has also developed a program that can sort consumers by their willingness to pay and adjust offers accordingly. If Walmart’s system deems you a sure thing — likely to buy a product at full freight — it can withhold a potential discount, sending you “marketing materials without the coupon.” The patent is startlingly specific about where it sets the threshold for an offer: if Walmart crunches the numbers and finds a shopper has at least a 90 percent likelihood of completing a purchase, “a coupon that provides a reduced purchase price for the product is not needed.” It’s a far cry from the days of weekly circulars, when every family had access to the same coupons and the same chance to shave a few dollars off the grocery bill.

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Not only does the deal you get vary based on who you are, so does the refund. When Walmart makes a mistake that cancels or delays a shopper’s order, one patent outlines an “appeasement” engine that decides whether and how much to compensate you. According to the patent , even your personality and demographics can factor into how much compensation Walmart decides it takes to appease you. So, if the system — what I’m calling the “Karen meter” — thinks you are prone to making a fuss, you may score a gift card or a discount on a future purchase. But if Walmart concludes you’re unlikely to cause a scene, you may get nothing at all.

Consumer profiling doesn’t end when you leave the physical and virtual storefront; the parking lot may be another zone for data collection. Walmart has filed a patent for a camera that measures changes in a vehicle’s suspension between entering and leaving the store, using it to infer whether the car got heavier from the shopper’s purchases. Paired with consumers’ license plate numbers — yes, Walmart has alluded to using Flock-style scanners at its stores — the system could generate a per-vehicle profile and “extend customized sales and/or offers.”

Walmart executives insist that they don’t personalize prices. But it beggars belief that Walmart is assembling an extraordinary array of information on shoppers just to offer them better discounts.

Walmart is telling different stories depending on who it thinks is listening: its customers, its investors, or the patent office. I suggest shoppers follow the money and consider whether the megacorporation would bother building a massive surveillance pricing apparatus unless it intended to use it to charge customers exactly what they’re willing to pay — and not a penny less.