Walmart Doesn’t Advertise Their Roll-Forward Pricing

Walmart is famous for lowering prices and calling them “rollbacks,” but sometimes the opposite happens, too. Reader Ben spotted this example of roll-forward pricing at his local Walmart on a clearance sign.

Of course, prices go up all the time, but Walmart doesn’t brag about it. Usually, tiny clearance price changes that aren’t really a sale are due to a retailer making the price conform to a price code, where the last two digits of a price denote whether it’s on clearance or not. In this case, though, the sign doesn’t even make that much sense. “Nothing directly under the sign was priced exactly at $50 – it was all priced between 25 and 50,” observes Ben. That is supposed to make us feel better, but somehow doesn’t.