Carson City, NV – On July 13, Nevada Attorney General Aaron D. Ford announced that Nevada has reached a $2 million settlement with Walmart due to the company’s alleged violations of the Nevada Deceptive Trade Practices Act. More importantly, Walmart will implement new procedures to stop price discrepancies between the shelf and the register. The settlement comes alongside a similar settlement with Colorado for the same allegations.
“After receiving several consumer complaints about Walmart stores in Northern Nevada, our consumer protection team took action,” said AG Ford. “Companies must ensure that a product’s shelf price is the same as the register price. This ensures transparency and enables consumers to make informed decisions on which products to purchase.”
AG Ford and Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser argued that Walmart’s method of updating prices in its stores sometimes led to differences between the prices on store shelves and the prices at the point-of-sale location of the cash register.
Walmart employees would accept price changes on a handheld device that would immediately change the price at the point-of-sale but would require a different machine to print the new price labels for the shelves. For a variety of reasons, this label was sometimes not placed on the shelf at the same time of the price change. The states alleged that this led to multiple occurrences of the posted price and the actual price being different. Moreover, the state Department of Agriculture conducted nine inspections of Northern Nevada Walmart locations for price discrepancies. Walmart failed four of these inspections.
In addition to the settlement, Walmart has implemented new policies including additional price change training; a requirement that the employee changing the price be physically present in the location of the item which is being repriced; and a limitation on labels employees can print at one time. In addition, Walmart has also begun the process of implementing electronic pricing on shelves and will conduct quarterly inspections of ten random stores in Nevada and Colorado to ensure these changes adequately reflect the shelf and register price for goods.
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