‘Disgusting anti-consumer behavior’: Shopper found an 8TB hard drive for $259 on Walmart. Then the price jumped to $369 when they returned to the tab

A Reddit user who posted as sirnick88 said they opened a tab on Walmart’s site to buy a Western Digital 8TB WD Red Plus NAS SATA hard drive for a home NAS setup. The shopper said they saw the drive listed at $259 and called it a good deal.

sirnick88 said they opened a second tab to check other specs and options. When they returned to the first tab, the listed price had risen to $369, according to the post. The shopper said they had seen Amazon raise the price of the same drive the day before and thought they might have missed a short pricing window.

The original poster said they asked their wife to search for the same item. The wife was able to complete a purchase at the $259 price, sirnick88 claimed. The shopper wrote, “This is disgusting anti-consumer behavior.” Screenshots posted with the thread showed the same 8TB WD Red Plus model, 5640 RPM with 256MB cache, listed as sold by Walmart at the two different prices.

Commenters described zip-code tests and other canceled low-price orders

sirnick88 later pinned an update after some replies suggested third-party sellers were involved. The shopper posted another pair of screenshots and said one came from their wife’s phone showing the drive sold by Walmart at $259 while their own phone showed the same item sold by Walmart at $369.

One commenter wrote that they tested shipping zip codes and saw $259 when using 90210 in California. The same commenter said zip codes such as 07094 in New Jersey or 30303 in Atlanta produced a $369 price or a pickup listing at a Secaucus Supercenter, or a third-party offer near $355. sirnick88 replied that the zip-code difference did not explain how their wife obtained the lower price or why the figure changed after they spent about ten minutes in another tab.

A different commenter said they found a low price on two Toshiba N300 12TB drives, placed an order that defaulted to store delivery within a few hours, and then received a cancellation notice stating the item was not available. The commenter said they logged back in, saw the price had roughly doubled while the drives still appeared available at the store, ordered again as a test, and received the drives about two hours later. They said they filed complaints with the Better Business Bureau and their state attorney general.

Another commenter wrote they had seen similar patterns at least five times: an attractive price, delays, a canceled order, then the item back in stock at a higher price. A further reply suggested the site might be testing what a shopper would pay and could log an IP address if the higher price was accepted. Such tactics can frustrate shoppers, and Walmart’s pricing controversies extend beyond online tests, as a Texas shopper peeled back a rollback sticker to find a lower original price. 

One commenter distinguished ordinary supply-and-demand shifts from what they called surveillance pricing, in which personal data is used to set an individual price. They argued the practice could amount to illegal price gouging. sirnick88 replied that they had looked up the two terms and were unsure which fit best. The retailer’s pricing issues extend beyond dynamic displays, as a couple was allegedly caught swapping price tags. 

A later commenter posted their own browser tests. They said an incognito Chrome window showed one price, a regular Edge window without incognito showed $369, and a signed-in Walmart+ account on Chrome showed $379.99 after a “marked down” label from a higher figure. They noted the exact model was not identical in every window.