Walmart doubled down on its pledge not to use AI or customer data to set personalized prices, rejecting a progressive critic’s claims that the retailer’s patents tell a different story.
FOX Business reported that Walmart executive vice president of corporate affairs Dan Bartlett issued a public letter Monday challenging what he called repeated mischaracterizations of the company’s pricing practices and technology.
The letter restated a simple line the company has pushed for weeks: Walmart prices products, not people. It also answered fresh pressure from Lindsay Owens, author of the book “Gouged” and president and CEO of Groundwork Collaborative, who has argued that Walmart’s patents and tools point toward personalized and dynamic pricing.
Shoppers already live with rising costs. What they do not want is a retailer quietly charging different people different prices for the same item based on income, history, or urgency. Walmart says that is not its model and will not become its model.
Bartlett’s message was direct and public.
In the letter, he wrote:
"The facts are straightforward. We price products, not people,"
He went further on what the company says it will not do with customer information.
"Walmart does not and will not use an individual customer’s personal information, income, shopping history, urgency or willingness to pay to set an individualized price. We do not engage in dynamic pricing, raising prices in response to a hot afternoon or an approaching snowstorm, for example."
That matters because dynamic pricing, charging more when demand spikes or conditions change, is exactly the practice critics say large retailers are drifting toward. Walmart says it is not doing that and has committed not to do it.
The Monday letter was not the first reassurance. On Sept. 25, Walmart President and CEO John Furner published a letter reaffirming the company’s “Every Day Low Prices” strategy and the same core claim: the company prices “the product, not the person.” Walmart also said it would not use personal data or AI to personalize prices.
Owens and other critics have pointed to digital shelf labels as a red flag. Bartlett rejected that reading.
He said the labels replace paper tags and let approved price changes show up more efficiently and consistently. He added a clear limit on what they can do.
"They do not identify customers, nor do they independently set prices."
In plain terms, Walmart is describing a display tool, not a system that scans who is standing in the aisle and invents a private price. If the labels only show prices the company has already approved, that is a logistics upgrade, not a personalized surcharge machine.
Owens has treated Walmart patents as proof the company is building individualized or dynamic pricing. Bartlett called that a leap.
He wrote that reliance on patents as evidence of future personalized pricing is misplaced, and repeated the company’s commitment.
"Another example is your reliance on Walmart patents as evidence that we will pursue individualized or dynamic pricing. Again, we do not and have committed not to,"
Patents can describe technology a company might explore. They are not the same thing as a live store policy that hits a customer’s receipt. Walmart is telling the public to judge the company by its stated pricing rules, not by activist readings of patent filings.
Owens did not accept the letter as the last word. She pushed back Monday and shared a statement with FOX Business.
She argued Walmart’s message changes depending on the audience.
"Walmart says one thing in its damage-control letters to customers, another to its investors behind closed doors, and a different thing entirely to the United States Patent and Trademark Office,"
She also framed the company’s technology buildout as a privacy and pocketbook threat and said she was releasing a new analysis of Walmart patents the same day so Americans could “decide for themselves.”
In her words, personal data is, according to those patents, “a critical element of the new pricing strategies the company is developing.” She warned about an “arsenal of technologies” that can profile and track people.
That is a serious charge. It is also still a charge. Walmart’s public letters say the company will not use personal information, income, shopping history, urgency, or willingness to pay to set individualized prices. Owens says the patent paper trail should make people worry anyway. Customers are left to weigh a clear corporate pledge against an activist’s reading of filings the public cannot fully inspect from the coverage alone.
The fight also runs through Sparky, Walmart’s AI shopping assistant. Owens has raised questions about safeguards and data use. In recent posts on X, she alleged that Walmart touted Sparky’s ability to increase spending and developed patented technology that could “vary prices based on consumers’ behavior and demand.”
Bartlett said those comments draw unfounded conclusions.
He stated flatly that Walmart does not use AI to upcharge customers. He also rejected the idea that higher average order values among Sparky users prove the tool raised per-item prices.
Higher average order values, he said, do not on their own establish that Sparky caused customers to spend more on individual items. They “certainly do not establish that customers were charged higher prices for the same items.” Sparky, in Walmart’s account, helps customers find, compare, and discover products. Information shared with Sparky, the company says, is not used to change the prices people pay.
There is a basic difference between a tool that helps someone fill a cart with more of what they want and a tool that quietly raises the price of the same item because the system thinks that shopper will pay more. Walmart says it is doing the first and not the second.
Owens’ book “Gouged” was published Sept. 29. Coverage describes it as an examination of corporate pricing practices that argues some “deceptive tactics” are used to “cheat consumers out of their money.” The Walmart letters landed in the same window as that launch and the public argument over AI, patents, and shelf technology.
Groundwork Collaborative, which Owens leads, is driving the patent analysis release. Walmart is answering in public letters aimed at customers and critics. One side sells a story of hidden pricing strategies. The other side keeps repeating a bright-line rule: product pricing, not person pricing.
No government order, lawsuit outcome, or regulator finding is described in the available account of this exchange. This is a corporate pledge fight and a public-relations fight, not a closed case with a court judgment. The strongest verified record here is what Walmart executives put in writing and what Owens put in her statement and posts.
Working families already stretch every grocery trip. They have every right to demand clear prices that do not shift with a profile, a weather report, or an algorithm’s guess about desperation. A major retailer putting that promise on paper is useful, and the public should hold the company to the words it chose.
If Walmart means “we price products, not people,” then every label, app, and AI assistant should stay inside that rule, no matter how loud the activist press conference gets.
