Oops: Walmart accidentally put the new Google Home speaker on clearance

It’s been a minute since the new Google Home Speaker with Gemini went on sale, and Google is already grappling to keep up with demand. Making this even more difficult for Google is Walmart, which not only put the new speaker up for sale earlier than Google intended, but is also letting buyers walk away with good discounts that make the clearance sale on older Nest speakers look like a dud.

According to a few posts on Reddit, Walmart may have briefly run a 30% off sale for the new Google Home speaker. Redditor eqbirvin claims, with photo evidence, that they were able to snag a new speaker for just $69, compared to the official $99.99 launch price. As spotted by another eagle-eyed commenter, the sticker says “Nest Audio,” which suggests an employee likely confused the new speaker with the older one and put them on sale unintentionally.

Some others also note that the sticker appears to have been swapped from another unit, but the OP says the original barcode on the box was scanned at checkout, and the price remains unchanged.

While there’s no way to guarantee, they’re probably not lying because a similarly discounted listing cropped up on Walmart’s website yesterday, but only for a short time. Another Reddit user Rossmay spotted the new speaker being listed for $69.98. While the price is tempting enough, Walmart’s promised delivery date was also sooner than Google’s. The discount, however, was only live on the black and Porcelain color variants, and not on the green and red ones.

Taking advantage of this discount, the user ordered not one, not two, not three, but four new Google Home speakers. However, comments on the post noted that the discount disappeared shortly after, and it was likely a technical glitch that Walmart fixed. Now, they’re waiting with “fingers crossed” for Walmart to actually deliver it.

While the deals are now gone, there’s a little caveat that you can exploit, and that is requesting Google to match the price of an online deal. It applies even if you’ve already bought something on the Google Store online, and you can request a partial refund for the product based on that listing.

As for our initial review of the speaker, it feels a bit slower to respond to queries and has a weaker audio system than the Nest Audio. We expected Google to address these niggles, and at least optimize it for faster Gemini responses. If you get a chance to use and test the speaker for yourself soon, we’d love to hear your feedback in the comments.