I wrote about this on LinkedIn recently, but the idea deserves more room, because the pricing conversation is getting louder.
Walmart is rolling out digital shelf labels, and the public suspicion is high:
To be fair, Walmart has said the technology isn’t being used for surge pricing. They've gone on the record to say that they "want to have consistent prices that build trust with customers.” The company has framed digital shelf labels as a way to update prices faster and make store operations more efficient.
Critics, though, are raising concerns about dynamic pricing, privacy, surveillance, and job impacts.
And that suspicion doesn’t come out of nowhere.
Instacart was caught charging customers different prices at the same time in the same store last year. In 2024, Wendy's threatened to use surge pricing and quickly backtracked after public outcry.
There’s also a long history of companies saying one thing and doing another, which stokes the fires of mistrust. So, when a retailer introduces technology that could make pricing more flexible, faster, and less visible to the customer, people are going to ask harder questions.
Once customers start asking, “Can I trust how this price got here?” you’re no longer just making an operations decision.
You’re making a trust decision.
And this isn’t just about Walmart.
Kroger is buying Giant Eagle in a $1.65 billion deal tied to scale, competitive pressure, operational efficiency, and the ability to fund price cuts.
General Mills is navigating cost-conscious consumers through pricing, promotions, product mix, and a major cost-savings plan.
Different companies. Same underlying friction.
When leaders are under revenue pressure, pricing starts to look tactical.
Cut or raise prices.
Bundle, promote, automate, acquire.
But pricing is also a decision about what you’re trying to protect.
What matters most? Margin? Market share? Customer loyalty? Brand trust?
Something else?
When you skip that decision layer, the tactic starts making the decision for you.
That’s where things get expensive.
Pricing feels concrete because you can point to the number.
This product costs X.
This service used to cost Y.
This discount ends on Z date.
It looks like the number is the decision.
But most of the time, the number is downstream from something harder.
What are customers being asked to believe?
What relationship are you trying to preserve?
What promise are you still able to keep?
That’s not just a pricing conversation.
That’s a leadership conversation.
A price is not just what you charge.
It’s what you are asking your customer to believe.
From the company side, the efficiency argument makes sense. Updating paper price tags across thousands of stores is slow, clunky, and labor-intensive. A digital system can make that process faster.
Look, I’m not anti-efficiency or anti-technology. And I’m definitely not opposed to making frontline work less cumbersome!
But efficiency is not the win if customers experience it as manipulation.
That’s the decision friction.
You may be solving an internal operations problem while creating an external trust problem.
And if trust is one of the Conditions for Success in your business model, you don’t get to treat it like a side note.
Customers need to believe the pricing logic is fair enough, clear enough, and not quietly rigged against them.
When the mechanism feels opaque, people fill in the blanks... and most of the time, they don’t fill those blanks with generosity.
Under pressure, leaders want to jump straight to the move.
Lower the price.
Create a premium tier.
Automate the pricing.
Maybe.
But the better question comes first:
What are we protecting?
If you’re protecting margin, that leads to one kind of decision.
If you’re protecting market share, that leads to another.
If you’re protecting customer trust, the decision may not just be about the price. It may also be about the explanation, the timing, and what you’re willing to make visible.
This is where a lot of teams get stuck.
Sales wants one thing.
Finance wants another.
Marketing sees the brand risk.
Operations sees the efficiency gain.
Nobody is necessarily wrong.
That’s what makes the decision hard.
High-stakes decisions often feel hard because every option has a downside. The work is not to find the magical option with no downside. The work is to name which risk you’re choosing and why.
Pricing conversations go sideways when leaders start with the number.
I recommend a different sequence:
Name what you’re protecting.
Name the risk you’re choosing.
Name what has to be true for the move to work.
That’s the decision layer.
It’s not flashy, but it’s where the real leadership work happens.
Pricing tells a story, and every pricing move carries a trust consequence.
Every discount trains the customer to believe something. Every automation choice creates a perception. Every acquisition made in the name of efficiency raises the question of who benefits and who pays.
Skipping that layer may feel faster in the moment.
But it usually means the same unresolved decision comes back later wearing a different outfit.
Now it’s a margin problem.
Then, it’s a messaging problem.
Then, it’s a retention problem.
After that, it’s a trust problem.
Maybe.
Or maybe the real decision was never made.
Consumers are more cost-conscious. Companies are under pressure to protect margin. Competition is intense. Efficiency matters.
So does trust.
That combination forces harder decisions.
Not fake hard decisions like, “Should we care about customers or profits?”
Real hard decisions like:
What can we still afford to promise?
What needs to change?
What are we no longer able to carry?
Sometimes pricing pressure reveals that the old promise no longer works.
Maybe the company promised premium quality at a mass-market price. Maybe it promised high-touch service at a rate that only worked when labor was cheaper. Maybe it promised access, speed, customization, or values-driven sourcing without ever deciding what those promises were allowed to cost.
That’s not just a pricing problem; that’s a business model problem.
And pretending it’s only about the number keeps everyone circling the wrong issue.
Circling a pricing decision is expensive.
It costs revenue, yes. But it also costs trust, morale, credibility, and leadership attention.
Customers feel jerked around. Teams don’t know what they’re supposed to defend. The brand says one thing while pricing behavior says another.
And the same unresolved tradeoff keeps coming back.
That’s usually the signal.
When the same issue keeps resurfacing with a slightly different name, you may not be dealing with a new problem.
You may be dealing with an undecided decision.
The One Move That Matters™ is not always the boldest or the most innovative move. Sometimes it doesn't even look impressive from the outside.
But it's always the courageous move.
In a pricing conversation, the move that matters might be naming the tradeoff before touching the price.
Or protecting trust before optimizing efficiency.
It might be simplifying the offer before discounting it.
Or maybe raising the price and telling the truth about why.
But until the real decision is named, every tactic is just another way to avoid the harder conversation.
Pricing isn’t the decision.
The trust tradeoff underneath it is.
And once you realize that, the next move gets a lot clearer.
If you’re circling a pricing, revenue, offer, or trust decision and every option has a downside, you may not have a pricing problem; it might be a decision problem.
That’s exactly what my Next Steps Session is designed to help clarify.
We’ll look at what’s really on the table, name the decision underneath the noise, and identify the right next step for you.
Book a Next Steps Session and let’s sort out what needs to happen first.
Y’all remember the Eisenhower matrix?
It’s the classic four-quadrant tool that helps you sort tasks by whether they’re urgent, important, both, or neither.
And when the categories are clear, it’s genuinely useful.
Urgent and important? Do it.
Important but not urgent? Schedule it.
Urgent but not important? Delegate it.
Not urgent and not important? Delete it.
I've used it for years and helped my clients apply it in their own life and work.
It works great...until it doesn't.
I mean, what happens when you’re in a season where E'RYTHANG looks like it belongs in the “urgent and important” quadrant?
That’s the part most prioritization advice skips.
And it’s the part a lot of leaders are living inside right now.
I talked about this on LinkedIn the other day: Urgency is not the same as priority. That post came from watching the way current leadership conversations are being framed at the highest levels.
Reuters reported that AI executives from Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, and Mistral are expected at the G7 summit as leaders discuss AI and online safety. Another Reuters report described the G7 agenda as dominated by Iran, Ukraine, global imbalances, critical minerals, and crisis management, with no major breakthrough decisions expected. Reuters NEXT Europe is also being framed around defense, energy, AI, industrial renewal, regulation, and business leadership under pressure. [1][2][3]
That means right now, leaders are trying to navigate AI, regulation, market pressure, geopolitical instability, talent issues, public trust, economic uncertainty, energy concerns, and strategic transformation… all at the same time.
That’s a lot!
And it’s not just happening on the world stage.
It’s happening inside organizations, leadership teams, founder-led businesses, and boardrooms everywhere.
The issues may be smaller in scale, but the pattern is the same:
Everything's trying to compete in the "Urgent & important" quadrant of the good ol' Eisenhower matrix.
And everything can’t be first.
You can't have a ten-way tie for first place.
Everything can be important.
Everything can deserve attention.
Everything can carry consequences.
But everything cannot be the number one priority.
The moment leaders start treating every issue as Priority One, priorities stop being priorities. They become a list of things people feel guilty about not doing fast enough.
Even in organizations with multiple departments, each area can only have one true priority at a given moment.
Sales may have a top priority that's different than Operations. And that may be different from HR or Finance.
But within each function, there is still a decision being made about what comes first.
It's a statement of sequence.
It's the answer to the question:
"What has to happen before the next thing can happen?"
That's why prioritization gets so uncomfortable.
Choosing a priority doesn't mean the other issues stop mattering.
It means you're deciding what gets protected first, funded first, staffed first, discussed first, and solved first.
And every time you make that choice, you're implicitly deciding what will wait.
That's the part many leaders try to avoid.
But avoiding the choice doesn't eliminate the tradeoff; it just hides it.
You'll eventually feel those consequences anyway.
So when everything looks urgent and important, the challenge isn't figuring out matters most (because it's ALL important!)
The challenge is deciding which one truly comes first.
Because everything can't be first.
When everything feels urgent, the natural impulse is to move toward the loudest problem:
And sometimes, yeah, the loudest problem needs immediate attention.
But not always.
Sometimes the loudest problem is just where the pressure valve is whistling.
The real issue may more likely be a decision nobody wants to make, a tradeoff nobody wants to own, or an initiative that you need to stop pretending is still on the table.
That’s decision friction.
What has to be decided first so the rest of the work can move?
That question changes the room.
Because now you’re looking for the decision underneath the noise.
This is where leaders can get themselves into trouble before things become a full-blown crisis.
Pre-crisis rarely looks dramatic.
It doesn’t always look like collapse.
It often looks responsible.
But when everything stays on the table, nothing has really been decided.
A packed agenda, like the one planned for the G7, can tell you what matters.
But a clear decision tells you what moves.
That’s a very different thing.
When leaders don’t name the real decision, the organization starts paying for it in ways that don't look like a big deal at first, but they compound over time:
And everyone is tired because they’re working hard, but they’re still carrying too many unresolved decisions.
That indecision is expensive.
It costs time, money, market position, talent, and credibility.
When I talk about decision clarity, I’m not talking about having perfect certainty.
We live in reality, not a dream world. Things move too fast for that (sorry Linears!).
High-stakes decisions rarely come with perfect certainty.
Decision clarity is about knowing what decision you’re actually making, why it matters now, what tradeoff comes with it, and what order the work needs to happen in so the system can move without breaking.
That last part matters.
Order of operations is not just a math thing (Thank God! My degree's in Music!).
It’s a leadership thing.
Some decisions need to happen before other decisions can make sense.
Some projects need to stop before the team has room to execute the new priority.
Some ownership gaps need to be closed before the work can move without becoming another fire drill.
The move that matters is not always the biggest, sexiest move.
It’s not always the one people are yelling about.
It’s the move that makes the next right thing possible.
When everything feels urgent and important, don’t start by asking which task belongs in which quadrant.
Start with any of these questions:
That’s where clarity starts.
Not with a prettier list.
Not with another prioritization hack.
With the courage to name the real decision, sequence the work, and give people enough clarity to move without leaving the entire organization wondering what's going on.