Walmart CEO John Furner issues letter rejecting personalized pricing

Walmart CEO John Furner published a letter to customers on the company's official website on September 25, stating that Walmart rejects personalized pricing, the practice of charging each consumer a different price. "We price the product, not the person," Furner wrote. The pledge does not stop at the digital price labels in stores. He made clear that Sparky, Walmart's AI shopping assistant, is bound by the same promise. The letter is built around three commitments not to factor a customer's income, shopping history or urgency into prices.

The first commitment concerns price itself. "We don't set different prices based on who you are or the time of day, and we won't," Furner wrote. Income, shopping history, urgency and what the company thinks a customer could pay will not change the price. He added that whether someone is buying groceries or electronics on a hot afternoon or is in a sudden rush for an item, it is never a reason to charge more.

The second commitment targets AI. Walmart promised it will not use any information, including what customers share with Sparky, to raise their price or hide lower-priced options that meet their needs. "When you engage with Sparky, that's an invitation to serve you better, not to use your personal information to set a personalized price," Furner wrote, adding, "We've never used the relationships our associates have with customers to charge more, and we won't do that with AI." The third commitment is to use information responsibly and respect customer choices. Customers decide whether to share additional details for more personalized help, and the company said it will be clear about how it uses and protects that information.

The letter closes with one more operating principle. People will continue to oversee pricing, and the company will monitor and test its technology against these commitments. Furner did not hide that prices can change. Walmart lowers them when it can pass savings along and sometimes raises them when an item costs more to buy or transport. But using someone's income, shopping history or moment of need to charge them more, he wrote, would violate EDLP, the Every Day Low Prices principle the company has kept for more than 50 years.

The backdrop to the letter is digital shelf labels. According to reports, Walmart said in March that 2,300 U.S. stores already use digital shelves, and it plans to expand them chain-wide within the next year. Because digital labels let a central computer change prices instantly, suspicion has grown among some shoppers, consumer advocates and lawmakers that they could become a tool for raising prices on the fly. Furner said the labels exist to keep shelf prices consistent with what rings up at checkout. As someone who has changed paper tags by hand over the years, he wrote, it is a time-consuming and unrewarding task.

Regulators have also been moving. According to reports, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission warned companies last month that personalized pricing practices could violate consumer protection laws. The agency acknowledged it lacks the legal authority to ban personalized pricing in all circumstances, but it issued a new bulletin stating that companies must disclose to customers how personal information is used to set a price. Walmart's letter is a public pledge, issued after that guidance, by the chief executive of a major retailer not to use personalized pricing at all.

The original letter METAL reviewed ties the scope of the pledge together across stores, online shopping and the AI assistant. Digital shelf labels in stores, online shopping and conversations with Sparky all fall under the same principle. METAL previously reported that Anthropic open-sourced a blueprint for commerce agents, and as AI assistants increasingly choose and negotiate purchases on a customer's behalf, the question of whose side the assistant works for becomes central.

Read through a tech lawyer's lens, the weight of this letter lies in the specificity of its wording. It lists one by one the factors it will not put into prices, such as income, shopping history, urgency, ability to pay and time of day, and it adds a promise not to hide cheaper options. In effect, the company itself acknowledged that an AI assistant could raise prices simply by reordering recommendations. A public pledge can become grounds for a deceptive-practices claim if conduct inconsistent with it later comes to light. At a moment when the Federal Trade Commission is stressing disclosure duties, Walmart has drawn its own baseline, and other retailers and AI shopping services now find themselves having to answer the same question.