Posts across TikTok, Reddit, and Facebook from people claiming to be the retailers’ workers, as well as consumers, show workers removing the bottom portion of tags with prices and consumers discovering ripped tags in stores. Posts show whole displays of clothing for brands like Walmart’s Wonder Nation and Target’s Auden at stores across the country with altered tags.
Social media posts accusing both retailers of the practice began appearing online around the same time. These posters claim that removing price tags can allow the retailers to raise prices more easily, possibly in response to tariffs, and the moves have garnered criticism both from workers who say their shifts have been dedicated to the task and confused consumers who believe the retailers are attempting to conceal price increases.
Retail Brew visited a New York City Target location on August 21 and 22 and found a significant number of removed prices across its private-label brands Auden, All in Motion, and A New Day. Many items weren’t re-stickered and had no indication of price. One item was not recognized by Target’s app when Retail Brew scanned its barcode.
Walmart tags that differ from prices on the signs, as seen in TikToks, are a result of incorrect placement or a sign representing the highest price of items in the display, per Laczkowski. Walmart does not have in-store price check scanners, so consumers must use the Walmart app, ask an associate to scan the tags, or bring the tag to checkout to confirm the price for tags whose price has been removed.
Target did not respond to questions Retail Brew sent regarding the price tag removals.
When asked about tariff-related price increases on its Q2 earnings call last week, Richard H. Gomez, Target’s EVP and chief commercial officer, said the retailer will “take price as a last resort.” He noted the retailer will be “leaning into” its private-label brands to deliver value to customers.
Ripped off: Jeff Sward, founding partner of retail merchandising consultancy Merchandising Metrics, and Liza Amlani, principal and founder of Retail Strategy Group, both told Retail Brew that price removal from tagged products is not a common practice.
Since retailers pay to label and price products, their subsequent removal is a “wasteful strategy,” Amlani wrote in an email, and Sward said doing so at such a high volume is a “highly inefficient, highly expensive process.”
The sole use of signs to indicate price for apparel at big box retailers can get “messy,” Sward said, and when there’s multiple styles on one fixture at different prices, or when products are moved to the wrong spot, it gets “messier and messier.”
“It’s just hard to believe that the big guys like Walmart and Target didn’t have a better mechanism for making this all happen,” he said. “Of course customers are going to get frustrated and maybe not buy stuff, [especially] if they think they’re in the process of being ripped off.”
