Retail news that keeps industry pros in the know
Retail Brew delivers the latest retail industry news and insights surrounding marketing, DTC, and e-commerce to keep leaders and decision-makers up to date.
When Walmart announced recently that it would install digital shelf price labels in about half of its stores by 2026, it looked to some like a harbinger that the retailer would implement dynamic pricing, the term for raising and lowering prices in real time. Walmart has insisted the new technology won’t be used for dynamic pricing, but Vusion Group, which makes the software Walmart is using, touts its ability to “dynamically update prices based on real-time data.”
Wendy’s will test dynamic pricing as early as 2025, insisting to the New York Times that it has no plans to raise prices when restaurants are busy but rather only lower prices when they’re slow.
Dynamic pricing is already common in Europe, not to mention surge pricing on rideshare apps, so it may gain more of a foothold in the US, too. But if retailers are weighing whether to adopt dynamic pricing, they’ll want to grapple with resistance to the idea on these shores.
Slightly more than one in five (22%) US consumers wouldn’t spend money at a business that used dynamic pricing, according to a new NerdWallet survey conducted with The Harris Poll in April.
The least resistant to dynamic pricing are Gen Z, only 15% of whom said they’d eschew stores that adopt the practice, while the most resistant are Gen X, at 29%.
Blush fund: The dynamic pricing question was part of a broader survey about spending on beauty products—some of whose findings, ironically enough, aren’t pretty.
Among those who reported purchasing beauty products or services for themselves, 15% used a credit card they didn’t pay off by the due date, while another 9% deferred payment by using buy now, pay later (BNPL).