Price-less shopping is not yet a widespread practice, and in some cases, even when the tags are removed from individual items, prices are still labelled on shelves or racks.Sammy Kogan/The Globe and Mail
Vass Bednar is the managing director of the Canadian SHIELD Institute and co-author of The Big Fix.
The end of the year promises a predictable pricing whiplash: Prices are marked down for Black Friday and Cyber Monday at the end of November and then we all rush to conclude our holiday shopping only to watch prices plummet again on Boxing Day. It can make you feel like a price tag is a charade of sorts.
Walk into an American Walmart lately and you might notice something missing in the clothing department: The physical price tags. Where small adhesive stickers once clung to T-shirts and tote bags, sometimes there’s now a smooth blank space. A Target employee recently told The Daily Dot that staff have been instructed to tear off price tags from clothing. On Reddit, employees at Canadian arts-and-crafts chain Michaels say they field a constant flow of shopper questions: Why don’t things have prices on them any more?
Prices are becoming a private piece of information. Some say it’s tariffs. But the real answer, apparently, is that retailers are experimenting. It’s not yet a widespread practice, and in some cases, even when the tags are removed from individual items, prices are still labelled on shelves or racks.
But for the biggest players in the industry, even a minor change can set a new norm. Removing physical price tags from some items might seem trivial or aesthetic, but it marks a consequential shift in the consumer experience. Brick-and-mortar shopping starts to look a lot more like the opaque and highly variable world of online retail.
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For decades, one of shopping’s foundational principles was that the price comes first. Consumers could look at a shelf and decide if the item fit their budget. But in stores without visible prices, that process gets scrambled. Shoppers have to scan items just to know what they cost. Some will skip the hassle altogether, reducing their ability to comparison shop. A recent investigation by The Guardian revealed that the dollar store industry consistently overcharges shoppers at checkout while promising low prices. Talk about a bait and switch.
Canada’s consumer protection framework tries to guard against this. The Competition Act prohibits double ticketing, meaning a retailer can’t charge more than the lowest clearly displayed price on a product. Quebec’s Consumer Protection Act goes further, requiring most items to have visible price tags or signage nearby. Ontario enforces detailed rules for electronics and bulk items, ensuring shoppers know what they’re paying for before reaching the register. And through the voluntary Scanner Price Accuracy Code, major Canadian retailers agreed to compensate customers if scanned prices exceed advertised ones.
All these measures rest on a basic premise: Visibility guards fairness. Consumers need to see a price to challenge it. Without that, trust and accountability start to erode.
That erosion mirrors what’s been happening online, where prices are already slipping into opacity. The Institute for Local Self-Reliance recently found that U.S. cities and school districts using Amazon’s business platform for procurement face wild price variation – one city paid $8.99 for a 12 pack of markers while a nearby district paid $28.63 for the same pack, on the same day. Amazon’s “dynamic pricing” algorithm constantly adjusts prices based on demand, browsing history or even zip code; leaving buyers unable to know whether they’re getting a deal or being quietly overcharged.
Removing in-store price tags imports that same structure of uncertainty into physical retail. It creates, in effect, the algorithmic marketplace without the algorithm. Prices become less knowable – sometimes intentionally obscured or inconsistently applied – giving firms leeway to test consumer tolerance in real time. The result is a widening asymmetry between buyer and seller.
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Economists call this a rise in “search costs”: The time and effort it takes to find out what something costs or whether a better deal exists. When search costs go up, consumers are less likely to compare prices or switch to competitors. That dulls the competitive pressure that keeps prices honest. For firms, this opacity can be profitable; for markets, it’s corrosive.
In practice, price-less shopping also pushes consumers deeper into data-dependent systems. To find out what something costs, shoppers are often encouraged to scan items with apps or log into loyalty programs. The price becomes available but only after you identify yourself. Knowing the price now requires being known.
Price transparency is the foundation of an informed market. It defines the bargaining space of capitalism. Firms have always had pricing power but it’s new to see some intentionally hiding prices altogether. What we can’t hide from is that prices are becoming less knowable over all – either intentionally obscured or artificially inflated or both. If we can’t figure out what something costs until we’re about to pay for it, that’s a pretty big price to pay.