UFCW Urges Lawmakers to Ban Walmart's Digital Shelf Label Expansion

The United Food and Commercial Workers International Union is calling on Congress and state legislators to ban electronic shelf labels as Walmart pushes toward a chainwide rollout, escalating a campaign that pits one of America's largest unions against its largest private employer over the future of grocery pricing.

Barely a month after launching its "Affordable Groceries and Good Jobs Campaign," the UFCW publicly denounced Walmart's plans to expand digital shelf labels to its entire U.S. footprint this year. The retailer already uses the technology in approximately 2,300 locations and expects to deploy it estate-wide within the next year.

"Walmart's move to accelerate its roll-out of electronic shelf labels coincides with Congress and states considering legislation that would ban this technology and the predatory pricing practices that go along with it," said Ademola Oyefeso, vice president of UFCW International, which represents roughly 1.2 million workers across grocery, meatpacking, food-processing, health care, cannabis and retail industries in the United States, Canada and Puerto Rico. "No retailer should beat lawmakers to the punch and get to escape accountability for the harms these technologies will cause consumers and workers."

In a written statement on March 6, Oyefeso laid out the union's core fear in concrete terms. "With this technology, retailers will be able to hike prices in the shopping rush before a snowstorm or after school lets out," he said. "The concept of a fair price no longer exists with electronic shelf labels. And it is not only consumers who will suffer. Workers could see their hours cut or could have to explain price changes to confused shoppers."

The UFCW describes electronic shelf labels as the "missing piece of the surveillance pricing" system, arguing that when combined with AI tools and data collection, "customers don't stand a chance at the grocery stores." The union's model legislation, introduced in several states, would require paper shelf pricing in any retail store larger than 10,000 square feet and prohibit surveillance pricing based on unique customer characteristics. Legislators in New York, Oklahoma, Washington, Arizona, Nebraska, Maryland and Tennessee have introduced anti-ESL bills, with federal legislation also in play. The union says it will deploy "targeted digital outreach" to mobilize support for the effort.

Jane St. Louis, a UFCW Local 400 member and grocery worker in Damascus, Md., offered a ground-level view of the stakes. "In my store, I see customers every day who've had to cut back—their grocery carts are smaller, and they're not buying the same products they used to," she said. "Surveillance pricing and ESLs will only make that worse if companies are jacking up prices on their customers one-by-one. ESLs threaten to take work away from workers, while leaving us to handle rightfully angry customers."

Walmart disputes the union's characterization directly. "It's important to remember that prices are the same for all customers in any given store and are consistent regardless of demand, time of day or who is shopping," the company said. "DSLs simply modernize how prices are displayed at the shelf." The retailer describes its system as a closed, centralized platform that does not interact with shoppers or collect any information about them, while also helping employees locate items for online order fulfillment, identify restocking needs and cut down on paper waste. Before digital labels, manually replacing paper price tags could take employees hours or even days.

The National Retail Federation backed that position, arguing that "labels are a communication tool, not a decision-making system," and that electronic shelf labels neither enable surge pricing nor collect personal data. The trade group pointed to a working paper from UC San Diego that found no evidence of electronic shelf labels causing price spikes, even during periods of elevated inflation.

Walmart is not alone in deploying the technology. Kroger, Schnucks and convenience-store chains H&S Energy Group and Kwik Trip have all introduced or announced plans to introduce electronic shelf labels, making the legislative fight a potential flashpoint for the broader grocery industry rather than a dispute confined to a single retailer.