Walmart’s everyday low low prices are thanks to department managers sneaking into local competing Kmarts with price guns, scanning everything, and then setting all of their prices 10 cents lower, according to a former employee and current Consumerist reader Altered Beast…
Wal-Mart had (has?) these small black electronic devices [Texlons], with a scanner and a keypad. As a group (3 or so of us, all department managers) we would head over to our local K-Mart. There, we would sneak around as a group in the equivalent of each department we managed. There we would scan the upc of various items we also carried, then punch in the price it was selling for. We were told that if we were caught, to just bolt out of there, and to NOT let anyone get a hold of this equipment! This was emphasized many times.
When we returned to Wal-Mart, we’d hand in our little machines, and a supervisor would set it in a docking station. The computer would then automatically generate new tags for our items at prices lower than K-Mart (usually around 10 cents lower). It didn’t seem to matter how much the product actually cost us, just as long as all our prices are lower than K-Marts.
Guess if you’re ever undecided about whether to buy a gallon of pickles from Walmart or Kmart, choose Walmart and save 10 cents/bushel and help feed America’s greatest oligopoly.
RELATED: Breaking the chain: The antitrust case against Wal-Mart [Harper's]
(Photo: Maulleigh)
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@Consumer-X: Hogswallop. I could care less that walmart is non-union. I don’t like it because shopping there is an unpleasant experience. It’s dark, dingy and dirty. The aisles are blocked with piles of crap I’d never want to buy. They’ve got twenty checkouts but never more than two are staffed. The employees look like the kind of beaten down women who won’t leave their abusive boyfriends either. And I know that my tax dollars are going to subsidize their food, housing, and medical because they haven’t got it in them to get up and leave and get a better job.
On the rare occasions that my wife drags me there for whatever damn thing she couldn’t find at Target that time, I’d GLADLY pay $0.10 for every item in the cart to be whisked away back to Target. Ugh.
I’m glad pretty much everyone here realizes this is a common practice with all companies and not just Walmart. I can remember when my mom worked at a supermarket in RI, a regional chain named Shaws, and also when she worked for Kmart they did the same thing. As for them using the telxons, I call bullshit on that. Since the units are on Walmart’s wireless network they won’t work if you leave the store. In fact if an employee is signed into one and then clocks out for lunch the telxon signs them out of it immediately so tell me how they could use it outside of the store then. Not possible.
Nowadays there are a couple of options available to wal-mart associates when price shopping. The latest and greatest method involves a pda which scans the barcode on the item, then the associate enters the price, and the location of the item. All this data gets logged in the pda’s memory until they return to the store, at which point it wirelessly syncs. The other, older fashioned choice is to print a report from wal-mart’s computers with all the items and blanks for prices from competitors. (I believe the two pda’s are made by symbol, and their model numbers are 8846 and mc50)
Either way, this is just old-fashioned capitalism, and an easy way for wal-mart to keep its low prices. Even though wal-mart specifically prohibits other stores from doing the same thing in its stores (it’s posted by pretty much every service desk in the country).
@j-o-h-n:
Here here, forget those ugly hags at Walmart, I only buy my Chineese made goods from beautiful people at Target.
Telxon=Tells On…=Tattletale?
Ya, this story is no surprise, and will eventually be obsolete when (and I’m assuming when, not if) all in-store pricing information is available online.
Managers sneaking around? I bet they feel mighty proud of their accomplishments.
“2 candies for you today. 3 tomorrow if you bring in more!”
So what? This has been going on since the start of competition and everybody does it. Does anybody not think that?
I think a lot of stores do this…I work at Shaw’s (a grocery store), and every week someone from our store will go to our competitor in town and check their prices to make sure we are in line with them. However! Taking a Telxon in and scanning everything you can before you get caught? A little over the top, IMO.
“So what?,” indeed. Although it makes a fantastic hysterical headline, it’s hardly industrial espionage. Prices in a public store aren’t a “secret.” And good for them for having the lower price.
Ben gets more and more gaytarded all the time.
FWIW, they are Telxons (not Texlons) and it’s pronounced tel-zon. I’m sure there’s more than one model, but the ones I’ve seen are not small and easily-concealable… they are larger than a PDA with a big trigger-like handle on the bottom. (This Google Image search shows several models, indeed some without handles, but still they all look larger than a graphing calculator.)
Whoops… what Freshyill said.
The funny thing about this is I remember a big hubbub in the late 90′s about this practice of price shopping, but it was Wal-Mart threatening to prosecute anyone they caught in their stores writing down price information (even if you were just doing your own personal price comparisons to decide where to buy something).
Symbol/Telxon makes finger scanners… they go on, say, your ring finger, and it is hooked up to the PDA (They make a wearable PDA). It would make for a really covert scanning operation.
[www.symbol.com] <– the ring scanner
[www.symbol.com] <– the WT4000 Series Wearable Terminal
if you own a store and you don’t regularly check competitor prices, then you are a pretty bad businessperson.
good for you, Walmart.
I remember being asked to do this by my district manager at the video store. He made me call around to all the competing video stores and ask them intricate questions about their pricing schedule for individual rentals and subscriptions. Unfortunately for my career in espionage, I called all of those stores at least three times a week to arrange trades when customers mistakenly returned their videos to us (or vice versa), and they all definitely knew it was me. Oops.
I worked at Wal-Mart for about 4 years and “comp shopping” was a weekly thing all department managers did. My manager was a fairly attractive little lady that was easily recognized and, because of that, she wasn’t allowed to go in to a lot of stores if someone recognized her. Also, they don’t take a Telxon with them, it’s a scanner that works on the same platform but is about the size of an old Nokia cell phone. They get all the info they scanned once they return to the store and upload it.
Admire or revile? Seems to be a question for the ages.
you know, even with some of the newer stores that Wal Mart have been building in my area (Greater Cleveland) and their shoddy attempts to emulate Target’s fonts and designs in certain things, like marquees, I still am not quite sold on shopping in a Wal Mart for alot of things and/or reasons.
Around my area, there’s still only one or two cashiers (like our two Super Ks), lack of any customer service, and their auto department even didn’t replace the oil in an oil change that I purchased from them! (It took them 2 1/2 hours to drain my oil and not put anything in there to replace it!)
So, yeah… dirty stores, shoddy service and a bad oil change that resulted in heavy repair costs have me preferring the more trendy and (for me) more reliable Target stores.
I’m not seeing the big tragedy. These prices aren’t an industry secret. It’s like espionage on a bus stop. They chose to lower their price in response to competition. Even consumers do the same on Ebay. There’s nothing illegal or immoral in this specific practice. I’m sure these companies have plenty of other problems that are more deserving of attention than this.
i’m confused. typically a bar code on a shelf tag would only contain the product sku – not any pricing information. that information is usually contained within the store’s (or company’s) database. the bar code only identifies the item.
soooooo…i would assume that the telxon scanners would only identify an item – the person using them would still have to manually enter the price of the item after (or before) scanning the bar code.
if the price of the item is included in the shelf tag bar code & i were the manager of a store that was regularly price checked by other store personnel, i think i would find a way to manipulate the price in the code just to screw up their little game. imagine manipulating the codes so they read $0.01 for EVERY item. does that mean walmart’s infallible system would be printing tags for $0.00 or even -$0.09? sweet!
Amusing anecdote:
I work for a consumer electronics company and I was doing a little bit of research on how are products were being placed compared to our competitors at different stores. I was occasionally approached at stores by a manager because I was photographing and writing things down on a clipboard. If bothered, I would just give them a business card and never had any problems.
One time I was doing this at Walmart and an employee came up and asked what I was doing. After I told him who I worked for, he told me that he assumed I was from the Best Buy up the street because apparently they were always in there scouting out Walmart’s pricing.
My point: every major retailer does this and why wouldn’t they?
I was one of the first employees at a Sears pilot store in West Jordan, Utah called “Sears Grand”.
Now, as confident as Wal-Mart seems, I’ll be damned if they didn’t try to sneak a peek at our building every five minutes….even before construction was complete! In fact, our security was so tight that when they did manage to get in, they ended up leaving in a police car minus several very expensive digital cameras.
Going on, after we had our grand opening, slowly but surely the Wal-Mart down the street started doing their displays a little different from other wal-marts, and lo-and-behold, they now had a full service tool department, they even had table saws!
Does anyone remember the electronics department remodel done in all Wal-Marts nationwide??? Yeah, that remodel is pretty much a poor man’s version of our electronics department in the pilot Sears Grand.
Nowadays the Wal-Marts are being remodeled to look like a bastard child of Sears Grand and IKEA. But don’t worry, you won’t be seeing any quality products or european modernism at Wal-Mart anytime soon!
By the way, we thoroughly enjoyed price-warring with Wal-Mart, even with the approval from corporate to do some serious damage.
(P.S., if you’re dumb enough to be sucked into buying something from Wal-Mart because the least expensive one beats all the other local stores, do yourself a favor and read up on the “Wal-Mart low price point strategy”.
I work at K-Mart but I’ve never seen this. Though our closest Wal-Mart is like 15 miles away. The Target is closer to them. Actually, we’re lucky to not have a Wal-Mart close to us being the highest successful K-mart in the company. I would love to tackle one of these Wal-Mart people. God would I love to do that. Get my hands on one of those devices and I’d be a king. A king I tells ya!
Seriously though, I would risk my job to get my hands on one of those computers. So you better stay out of our Doylestown, PA store.
Although it seems a little under handed it’s very fair to check out your competition and if you can beat them great. Almost every other store does the same weather it’s Wal-Mart or Goodyear they all check out the other guy so they can beat them. That is how out economy works so get used to it.