Bentonville, Arkansas, U.S.A.-based retail giant Walmart is facing another class-action pricing suit, just months after it paid USD 45 million (EUR 41.6 million) to settle a class-action lawsuit over improperly weighted products – including seafood offerings.
Yoram Khan, the plaintiff in the case, has alleged that the company’s actual prices are 10 percent to 15 percent higher than what is posted on its shelves.
Kahn bought items in August 2022 at a Walmart location in Niles, Illinois, saying that he relied on shelf pricing when deciding what to purchase. The 15 items amounted to a pretax total of USD 27.69 (EUR 26.00), the appeals court ruling stated.
However, after paying, Kahn reviewed the receipt and found that Walmart charged him 10 percent to 15 percent more than the listed shelf price on six of the items he purchased. Kahn’s attorneys investigated Walmart’s shelf pricing at other stores in Illinois, Florida, Indiana, Maryland, New Jersey, and New York and found similar examples of overcharging.
“We reject Walmart’s arguments that courts should overlook the realities of attempts to influence consumer behavior. This case concerns the nation’s largest retailer, which allegedly stands to profit by hundreds of millions each year from shelf-pricing discrepancies,” the appeals court wrote. "It is reasonable to assume that Walmart can afford to, and does, hire leading consumer researchers and experts. Reasonable consumer behavior does not require shoppers to audit their transactions and to overcome those additional hurdles just to ensure that they receive merchandise at the advertised shelf prices.”
Walmart announced in June, six months after the case was originally argued in a lower district court, that it was testing new digital shelf labels that would manage pricing of the store’s products, per USA Today. The digital labels will allow Walmart “to update prices at the shelf using a mobile app, reducing the need to walk around the store to change paper tags by hand and give us more time to support customers in the store,” a company spokesperson told USA Today.
Meanwhile, in a separate class-action suit against Walmart involving sustainable seafood marketing claims, the judge in the case has extended the discovery deadline …
