Maryland becomes first state to ban surveillance pricing in grocery stores

> Like, prices are displayed on the shelf for everyone to see. And they have to match what you pay at checkout.

Not all stores honor the prices posted on the shelves. Dollar General is one of the major offenders of this.

> Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey has filed suit against Dollar General, claiming deceptive and unfair pricing at its more than 600 retail stores throughout the state. The lawsuit alleges that Dollar General violated Missouri’s consumer protection laws by advertising one price at the shelf and charging a higher price at the register upon checkout.

> The joint investigation revealed that “92 of the 147 locations where investigations were conducted failed inspection. Price discrepancies ranged up to as much as $6.50 per item, with an average overcharge of $2.71 for the over 5,000 items price-checked by investigators.”

https://progressivegrocer.com/dollar-general-accused-decepti...

The bill involved is HB 895. Maryland's online statutes have not been updated (yet) to include the new sections.

https://mgaleg.maryland.gov/2026RS/bills/hb/hb0895E.pdf

The convention (among US state legislatures) is that existing language of statutes is in plain text, strikethrough is text to be removed and underlined is text to be added.

E-ink price tags are not uncommon. Technology to track individual customers through the store based on smartphone RF is already deployed in many supermarkets. Some stores even do scan-as-you-shop, where the customer scans the item at the shelf, rather than at the front of the store. There are certainly a lot of i's to dot and t's to cross, but it's hardly a theoretical impossibility - find the right store and you could do it today with no more than a software update.

For individual discrimination (vs neighborhood or time of day), one way would be what Macdonalds does:

- raise all the prices

- have an app (with an account) to give personalized discounts

- use “AI” (or, just a regular program) to pick the optimal set of discounts per person, squeezing as much as you can out of them

> So how the heck would a grocery store even do this? And this law is specifically around grocery stores.

Can't you just (in principle) use facial recognition cameras to determine who is approaching an item, calculate a "personalized" price and display it before they pick up the item, then make sure you match it at checkout? You could even use computer vision to only update price labels when people aren't looking at them, predict walking trajectories to pre-load prices and pre-resolve conflicts, and in ambiguous/low-confidence situations you could fall back on a default price.

This all sounds a bit like science fiction, but there is some prior art with Amazon's retail experiments, and it seems like this sort of thing is getting easier and cheaper all the time.

edit: some people have noted that you can have prices only visible viable via scanning qr codes, which makes this all much simpler. But I think you could do it with visible price labels too---you would lose some opportunities to jack up prices e.g. when multiple people are in close proximity to an item, but you could still profit in the (likely a majority of) situations where that's not the case.

> Like, there was a big kerfuffle a while ago about how Wendy's was going to engage in dynamic pricing so that a burger would be cheaper during the slow period at e.g. 3-4 pm, compared to the lunch rush. But that wasn't personalized. And the outcry was so strong they never did it, no law needed.

That's crazy that people were kerfuffled over it as stated. Restaurants very commomly have early bird and happy hour specials which sounds like the same thing. Please come when we're not usually busy, thanks.

The use case that jumps out at me is long tail items and whales. Let’s say that you’re a wine store, and you have an assortment of nice Italian wines all priced at $40 (to make it tidy). You’ve priced them competitively to attract your Chianti drinkers to step up and splurge if it’s a special occasion. A customer walks in, and the system recognizes that’s it’s Giovanni Vinoamore. Giovanni only comes in twice a year, but when he does, he leaves with two dozen bottles of Brunello and Barolo. It automatically raises the price of all those $40 bottles to $50. In the moment, you don’t care if a Chianti drinker puts a bottle of Barolo back, because you’ll make way more than that off of Giovanni. Once Giovanni leaves, the prices return to $40.

Stores are now putting QR codes for pricing, not listing the prices out on stickers/paper. You check on your phone, and often times walk through "scan and go" making direct payment on your phone.

This is often done in stores where they say that prices can change daily, and that these tools help them keep prices up to date. The darker pattern is what this law prevents, and that even with this sort of labeling, they can't charge you different from what they charge me in the same store.

A lot of grocery stores allow ordering online for pickup or delivery.

The answer is loyalty programs. I wouldn't be surprised if many existing loyalty programs already violate this law in spirit. The customer is encouraged to scan their app, and offered personalized coupons. Anyone not participating pays the base (highest) price possible, and those who are price conscious get a tailored discount, which is not necessarily the same discount as their neighbor.

(As an added bonus, the data stream from the loyalty program is attractive to marketing teams. Want to not be tracked? Higher prices for you!)

Its probably easier these days for a customer to fight the checkout price than it would be for the store to implement surge pricing or whatever they want to do. Just take a timestamped photo of the price when you pluck the product off the shelf and compare it at the register. We could probably make an app that does all the calculating for you to verify and the only thing one would need to do is take a bunch of pictures as they shop, which is fairly trivial.

Its a much bigger problem on things like Amazon. My expectation is that Amazon would come under the provisions of this law if the buyer was in Maryland. One the most annoying things about Amazon is looking at different prices using a browser with no history and a VPN putting you in a different zip code, than the same product on your browser where they can see where you are coming from and know who you are.

Summary on the governor's site says it applies to 3rd party delivery services.

https://governor.maryland.gov/news/press/pages/Governor-Moor...

Everyone seems to be discussing physical, in-person shopping. Multiple stores near me do "Click'n'collect", where one picks out items online and just drives to the store to collect them (for example) on the way home from work

Surveillance pricing something like that, pretty much entirely online? I think we can all imagine how to set that up without too much trouble

If a grocery store raises shelf prices across the board to be able to give discounts to a few, it will likely to lose customer footfalls to stores that don't. Grocery globally is generally (except food deserts in high crime areas) is a hyper competitive business with very low margins. So preventing personalized price increases should be the policy priority.

Based on the headline I thought it was what grocery chains here in Norway do, where they have people hired to "shop" at a competitor while simultaneously noting prices on items. If they see the competitor has lowered the price of milk, they'll lower it to match.

Apparently they can do such adjustments multiple times a day back and forth.

Been some talk about banning that here.

personally, I think grocery stores do it in reverse. They raise prices across the board, and lower them if you give them your data for a loyalty program.

Even though the price goes down, they adjust prices for you based on your personal data. You pay more if you don't give it up.

They remove the pricetags and replace them with a shopping ap able to track your habits and maximize your spending.

This already happens online. Try getting two people to book a vacation, one on a new iphone and one using an ancient android. Prices will differ.

Facial recognition

https://epic.org/krogers-surveillance-pricing-harms-consumer...

>"surveillance pricing" (which is just a scarier-sounding synonym for "dynamic pricing")

For your consideration:

>"dynamic pricing" (which is just a friendlier-sounding synonym for "surveillance pricing")

Is the weather forecast calling for significant snow accumulations? Increase bread prices.

That's how

'price listed is valid for the next 5 minutes' is how imagine enshittificaiton looking here.

>Customers will need aggressive agents to price-shop on their behalf. Take hotel booking as one of the current nightmares of price visibility.

Or I'll just buy as little as possible and buy used whenever possible.

The only answer I see anyone suggest is _more_ complexity. "This complex system we've built is flawed. I know what to do: I'll add another layer of complexity and abstraction on top of it."

"Needing" buying agents would be the worst possible outcome. How could I possibly trust the buying agent? Wouldn't that agent just take funds from companies to promote their products as suggestions?

shopping, 2000: go to store. take item off shelf. hand cashier indicated amount of money. leave.

shopping, 2030: use your personalized AI agent ($100/month subscription) to simultaneously impersonate a dozen clients across five different online shopping platforms with the goal of tricking the sellers' AI agents into thinking you're poorer than you are so that you can pay $5 for bananas instead of $25.

Customers require consumer legislation and protections, not further entrenchment of AI oligopolies.

We need to invert the markets. Show the demand at a specific price the community is willing to pay for a given thing in a given area and let the grocery stores come down to that price, instead of having the markets guess and fail.

Like, basically how an exchange works. We should go massively capitalistic with purchasing everything, even gum.

The fines need to be something big enough to notice. There are currently lots of stores with one price on the shelf with a higher price at the register. In the past, it would be easy for it to happen by mistake. Now it is happening so frequently & systematically at the smaller retailers - like Dollar General or Family Dollar - that it is becoming a noticeable issue for states with poorer communities.

> All told, 69 of the 300 items came up higher at the register: a 23% error rate that exceeded the state’s limit by more than tenfold. Some of the price tags were months out of date.

> The January 2023 inspection produced the store’s fourth consecutive failure, and Coffield’s agency, the state department of agriculture & consumer services, had fined Family Dollar after two previous visits. But North Carolina law caps penalties at $5,000 per inspection, offering retailers little incentive to fix the problem. “Sometimes it is cheaper to pay the fines,” said Chad Parker, who runs the agency’s weights-and-measures program.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/dec/03/customers-pa...