The price tag is going digital.

Walmart is leading the charge into the future of in-store shopping as the the mega-retailer and other chains, including grocery giant Kroger, are replacing paper-and-ink price tags with electronic labels that can be used to quickly raise or lower the price of an item.

Electronic shelf labels are already common in Europe and will become wider spread in the U.S., with Walmart planning to implement the labels in 2,300 stores by 2026. Several Walmarts in California already feature the new technology, a spokesperson said.

It is a transition that’s prompted concerns that the technology opens the door to price gouging despite retailers’ assurances that the labels won’t be used to jack up costs.

With the electronic labels, employees can update prices on products in a few clicks, sparing them the time-consuming task of making printed labels and putting them in place, retailers say. But the increased efficiency has been met with wariness among consumer advocates, including U.S. Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Bob Casey (D-Pa.), who worry that the ability to easily change prices paves the way for grocers to take advantage of customers.

“These digital price tags may enable Kroger and other grocery chains to transition to ‘dynamic pricing,’ in which the price of basic household goods could surge based on the time of day, the weather, or other transitory events,” the senators wrote in a letter to Kroger Chief Executive Rodney McMullen.

Dynamic pricing could mean raising the cost of ice cream on a hot day, for example, or quickly raising the cost of water and canned goods before an upcoming storm. Kroger and Walmart said they have no plans to implement dynamic pricing, and added that electronic shelf labels will only be used to help lower costs.

“Kroger’s business model is to lower prices over time so that more customers shop with us,” a Kroger spokesperson said. “Any test of electronic shelf tags is to lower prices more for customers where it matters most. To suggest otherwise is not true.”

A Walmart spokesperson said updates to the electronic tags will be used to reflect lower prices for items on sale or final clearance. Prices will not change throughout the day, she said.

Walmart’s low prices are serving the company well as consumers navigate inflation and seek bargains for everyday goods. On Thursday, the company released its earnings report for the second quarter, which exceeded expectations. Comparable-store sales — which include sales online and at stores open for at least 12 months — rose 4.2% in the U.S. That compares with 3.8% in the first quarter and 4% in the fourth quarter last year. The company’s stock price rose 6.5% on Thursday to $73.18.

Grocery industry analyst Phil Lempert said the digital tags will help save time and money amid a labor shortage, but they could lead grocery chains down a slippery slope.

“If you can make it electronic you can take a lot of costs out of the system, and that’s great,” Lempert said. “But once that’s installed, and regardless of what any retailer is going to say, it’s now easy to change prices.”

Santiago Gallino, a professor specializing in retail management at the University of Pennsylvania, said he hasn’t seen signs that retailers plan to use electronic shelf labels for surge pricing.

“In my conversation with retailers, it’s clear that those who are pushing towards this technology are mainly trying to drive efficiency up in the stores and try to reduce costs,” Gallino said. “Grocery retailers operate on very thin margins, so every time they find technology that can help them save in labor, they will do that.”

What grocery stores save in labor they may lose in customer trust and loyalty, however, said RetailWire CEO Dominick Miserandino.

“Consumers are exceptionally skeptical,” he said. “When most of the consumer reaction to any product seems to be overwhelmingly negative, it’s probably a product that one might want to reevaluate quickly.”

With years of high inflation having pushed up prices for everyday goods, consumers are especially wary of price gouging, Miserandino said. Fast-food chain Wendy’s faced heavy backlash earlier this year over new digital menu boards and the prospect of dynamic pricing.

Along with the senators’ letter, Vice President Kamala Harris underscored the political potency of the issue with word she plans to voice support for a federal ban on corporate price gouging on groceries in a speech later this week, the New York Times reported.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

In a cavernous, 50,000-square-foot industrial event space in Culver City stand the charred remnants of six cars destroyed by rocket-propelled grenade fire. There are portable toilet stalls, their doors riddled with bullet holes. There are tents, camping gear, clothes hanging on lines and tables labeled “Lost and Found” filled with rows of everyday items such as shoes, sunglasses, bags, toiletries and keys.

These and hundreds of other items — including a large canopy under which 3,000 partygoers danced — were salvaged after the Hamas-led terror attack on the Nova Music Festival in Israel on Oct. 7.

They are part of the “Nova Music Festival Exhibition: October 7th 06:29 AM — the Moment Music Stood Still,” an immersive memorial that re-creates a sense of the horrors that unfolded early that morning and its aftermath while honoring victims and survivors.

As festivalgoers danced, a barrage of rockets landed and thousands of Hamas gunmen and other insurgents from the Gaza Strip swarmed across the border into southern Israel. The attack killed about 1,200, including 405 Nova attendees, many of whom were ambushed as they attempted to escape in their cars or to hide in bomb shelters and nearby fields. More than 250 were abducted that day; 45 were festival participants — some of whom remain in captivity in Gaza.

Interspersed among the artifacts is harrowing real-time video taken by attendees — unknown to them that they were dancing in the last moments just as the onslaught began — as well as body-cam footage taken by Hamas terrorists, who then posted the contents online.

“I love everyone. I want to go home. I already miss everyone,” festival survivor Noa Kalash says in phone footage made while she hid during the attack.

In a heartbreaking audio exchange, Meirav Gonen tells her daughter Romi, who is shot and trying to flee, “Romily, you’re not alone. You’re with me, my beautiful one. Everything is OK.” Romi, who turns 24 on Sunday, was taken captive and remains in Gaza.

“Dad, I’m calling you from the phone of a Jew. I just killed her and her husband,” one of the terrorists says in a call broadcast on a video screen.

The exhibition is spread over several rooms and includes video testimonials of survivors, first responders and family members of those still held hostage. Portraits of those who were killed that day line three walls.

Survivors of the festival are on-site to share their experiences.

“I hope that people take out of this place the message of what happened to human beings,” said Millet Ben Haim, 28, who hid for more than six hours in bushes with her friends before being rescued.

“We’re shining a light on these atrocities not to rattle people but to ensure that it doesn’t happen again.”

Also, she said, the goal is to focus on “love, compassion and life rather than on darkness and not to let hatred change our hearts.”

Irish Israelis Emily and Laura Damti want people to know about their younger sister Kim, 22, whom they described as a beautiful, gifted student. She was killed while seeking refuge in a bomb shelter with her friend Omer Wenkert, 23, who was taken hostage in Gaza, where he remains. “She was a radiant presence of positive energy and golden curls,” Emily said.

Scooter Braun, chief executive of entertainment company Hybe America and a music manager whose clients have included Justin Bieber and Ariana Grande, was instrumental in bringing the exhibit to the U.S., as were Omri Sassi and Ofir Amir, co-founders and producers of the Nova Music Festival, creative director Reut Feingold and American partners Joe Teplow and Josh Kadden.

Braun said he was moved to act, angered at what he saw as the music industry’s silence after the massacre.

In 2017, two weeks after a suicide bomber blew himself up and killed 22 people at Grande’s concert in Manchester, England, Braun helped organize the all-star One Love Manchester benefit concert and television special, which raised nearly $3 million to help victims.

“That is what’s so frustrating to me,” he said. “We had no issue stepping forward against an ideology, the same ideology that caused this and demanding that this is not acceptable.”

Braun saw this as an opportunity to coalesce around shared values and humanity.

“I started to speak out and try to make people hear each other. I believe that we aren’t living in the Middle East, and this is a place where people of all shapes, sizes and colors come to find a new life. And I thought, ‘Why are we yelling at each other here but expecting them to have peace there?’ We need to set the example.”

Music manager Scooter Braun was instrumental in bringing the exhibition to the United States.

(Richard Shotwell / Invision / Associated Press)

Advertisement

In December, Braun flew to Israel. He visited Kibbutz Beeri, a community left in ruins by the Hamas-led attacks, where residents were tortured, killed or abducted. He also visited the field where the festival was held. “These people were the hippies of the country. They were peace-loving people who wanted better for everyone. And they were just massacred.”

Braun met with survivors at the Nova Healing Camp who invited him to an exhibition in Tel Aviv. It was a small re-creation of the festival set up in a hangar.

“It was simply a place for people to go and think of their loved ones and everyone who had been affected,” he said.

“When I saw it, I immediately thought to myself, ‘This is what I’ve been looking for to help tell this story because I just want to show people each other’s humanity.’ I think we all love music. So this is a way to show people, step out of the politics and realize what happened here.”

Although the organizers insist the exhibit is neither political theater nor agitprop, it was met with anti-Israel demonstrations in New York in June. Protesters lighted flares, waved banners and shouted slogans such as “Long live the Intifada,” “Israel go to hell” and “The Zionists are not Jews and not humans,” according to videos posted on social media and news reports.

The Oct. 7 attack set off Israel’s campaign in Gaza aimed at destroying Hamas. The death toll among Palestinians has risen to nearly 40,000, according to the health ministry there, whose numbers do not demarcate between civilians and combatants. Much of Gaza’s 2.3-million population has been displaced and large parts of its cities have been reduced to rubble.

Nerdeen Kiswani, a pro-Palestinian activist, called the exhibition “propganda used to justify the genocide in Palestine” on her X account and wrote that the Nova festival was “a rave next to a concentration camp.”

The protest at the exhibition elicited a flood of denunciations, including from the White House, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and New York Atty. Gen. Letitia James. U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) called the protest “atrocious antisemitism — plain and simple.”

Braun responded to the demonstration by extending the exhibition an additional week.

More than 100,000 people attended the exhibit during its New York run, including Mayor Eric Adams and Gov. Kathy Hochul.

Of the protests, Braun says, “I think free speech was designed to create a dialogue between us. If someone is conscious and they want to protest, then I challenge them to be considerate enough to walk through the exhibit and give it the respect it deserves and maybe see a different point of view. I want everyone to see this. I want everyone to realize that we need to start seeing each other’s humanity and realizing music must be a safe place and see ourselves in this festival.”

Photos of festivalgoers killed and taken captive by Hamas-led militants during their attack on Israel last year populate the field where the Nova festival was held.

(Ohad Zwigenberg / Associated Press)

The exhibition is expected to be in L.A. through mid-October. Braun said organizers will commemorate the anniversary of the attacks on Oct. 7. During the exhibit’s run, educational events are planned with a focus on outreach to different communities in Los Angeles.

The organizers said they hope to bring the exhibition to other locations, including Miami, Toronto and Washington, D.C.

In the final room of the exhibit, a neon sign reads, “We will dance again.”

“That is not just for us,” Braun said. “That is for all people. We want to dance with all people. And I think that that message is what needs to be heard in these times.”

The Nova exhibition opens to the public Saturday. The privately funded exhibit is selling tickets for $8, $18, $36, $72 or $180, and students can attend free of charge; all proceeds go to the Tribe of Nova Foundation, an Israeli nonprofit and an IRS-approved U.S. public charity initiative, earmarked for medical and mental health treatment and other support projects for victims and families of the Oct. 7 attacks.

The morning along the San Pedro docks began typically enough, summery but cool, as the first shift powered up the Port of Los Angeles. The giant cranes that fill the sky like skeletal bridges hummed to life. Semis already were lined up at the front gates, ready to take on loads of shipping containers as big as mobile homes.

But at a little past 7, an all-too-familiar trouble flared. A blip in the electric power lines so short it barely registered on the monitors of the L.A. Department of Water and Power brought major operations at the busiest seaport in the Western Hemisphere to an abrupt stop.

If the public face of the port is the forest of cranes and mountain range of cargo containers, its invisible heart is a network of computers that controls almost the entire operation. That system, along with a growing multitude of electric-powered equipment and vehicles, depends on an uninterrupted supply of electricity. Rebooting all those smart devices, sometimes requiring workers to climb to the tops of 200-foot cranes, can take several hours, no matter how brief the outage.

By the time everything was back up and running on that August morning, unloading schedules were scrambled, frustrated terminal operators struggled in vain to make up lost time and the freeway was backed up by dozens of semis.

“It’s a significant direct financial impact,” said Jeff Vogel, general counsel to the National Assn. of Waterfront Employers, whose members include container-handling companies. “We operate in a just-in-time economic model where getting that vessel in and out of the port as quickly as possible is critical.”

And the impact of power interruptions goes beyond the immediate costs and frustration. It threatens a commitment to meet major, long-term climate change goals by further electrifying port operations and the huge distribution system it supplies.

The brief surge was one of three already this month and the 12th power-related outage of the year so far. And the recent disruptions hit particularly hard as summer is a busy season for the ports, with back-to-school and Halloween deliveries as well as retailers getting a jump on Christmas shipments. The Port of L.A. had a record July, handling more than 939,000 containers.

“It’s a pretty big deal with the amount of cargo they have to move,” said Thomas Jelenić, a vice president at the Pacific Merchant Shipping Assn., which represents the terminal operators.

It will be an even bigger deal down the road. The port, with the DWP, is aiming to phase out greenhouse gas emissions by the end of the decade.

To meet this goal, the port will need almost twice as much power as it currently uses by the end of the decade, DWP estimates. But the surges and dips have raised serious concerns about whether the port and its tenants will have reliable energy to meet their needs.

The private companies that operate container-handling terminals long ago electrified the massive ship-to-shore cranes and are now investing millions to transition forklifts, gantry cranes and yard tractors that move and stack containers, as well as other vehicles and equipment that run mostly on diesel.

“We’re up against the zero-emission mandate by 2030, and I don’t know how that happens right now,” said one terminal executive who asked not to be identified. None of the seven container terminals at the Port of L.A. would talk publicly about their grievances, saying they were concerned how municipal authorities who are their landlord and power supplier might react.

Though the Port of L.A. and its Long Beach sister facility are on the leading edge, other seaports around the country also have been moving to electrify their operations. That’s placed more demand on the grid, with occasional brownouts having been reported at some ports in the East and Gulf coasts, said the Waterfront Employers’ Vogel.

But the problem appears to be particularly acute at the Port of Los Angeles, he said.

At the Port of Long Beach, where electricity is supplied by investor-owned Southern California Edison, terminal operators say power interruptions haven’t been an issue. In fact, Sean Gamette, the port’s managing director of engineering, couldn’t recall a single outage this year.

It’s helped that Southern California Edison’s lines are mostly underground and that the port, deemed a vital infrastructure, is exempt from brownouts, an outage resulting from a temporary drop in voltage. In the mid-2000s some $180 million was invested to upgrade the electric infrastructure at the port, said Gamette.

Gene Seroka, executive director of the Port of Los Angeles, was careful not to overstate, or minimize, the disruptions and the threat to the operations. Power surges tend to affect only some of the terminals, he said, and typically everything is rebooted in a couple of hours. If you have on average one brief outage a month, that might add up to one lost shift out of 36, Seroka said.

“I don’t think it’s shutting down this port. It is not terribly impacting competitiveness.” But he added: “If I’m a terminal operator and I’ve got to pay workers for a shift that they’re not working, that’s very painful. And so we’ve got to fix it.”

The issue isn’t just financial. Outages pose safety risks, too. At one terminal yard, a power surge in mid-July caused a driverless cargo-moving truck to crash into a container. “You can have a crane operator get violently stopped and jostled,” said another terminal manager.

Terminal operators say they think the source of the outages is at the utility, and have wondered whether the DWP has even recorded the momentary outages that cause costly delays on the docks.

DWP officials say it’s not a one-sided issue and, at the request of The Times, furnished a synopsis of the dozen outages this year. The utility said two were due to birds hitting power lines, one was caused by a truck explosion and another because a power transformer went bad.

But according to the account provided to The Times, in five outages, each lasting 10 seconds, no cause was found. Simon Zewdu, a senior manager of the DWP’s power system, said such momentary outages are usually due to an issue on the user’s side.

“Increasingly we’re seeing equipment installed by our customers that are very sensitive to minor voltage fluctuations,” he said.

Zewdu said the DWP is working to expand substations at the Port of L.A. and construct new underground lines as part of a $500-million project to be completed by 2029. These efforts should help both add power and improve reliability.

In addition, Zewdu and the Pacific Merchant Shipping Assn. began a fresh round of meetings this week to discuss strategies to mitigate outages and with an eye to their zero-emission goal. Among other things, Zewdu said he wants to install monitoring equipment on circuits on both the utility and terminal sides to discern the source of the power surges — something he said hadn’t been done yet because the terminal operators had not made a request or given permission to DWP’s power quality-monitoring team.

Jelenić, of the Pacific shipping group, said that until Monday he wasn’t even aware such a monitoring program at the DWP existed.

“Right now we’re deficient in both our near-term and long-term needs,” he said, but added that his group had a very encouraging meeting with DWP officials this week. “They were concerned about issues we’re having, they proposed solutions, and made clear, open lines of communication.”