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Massachusetts has had fair pricing laws for grocery stores for years that I suspect already de-facto ban "dynamic pricing". It requires grocery stores to ring up the item at the lowest marked or advertised price, or the item is free. It also requires all items to be marked (or have scanners available to show the price), so they can't get around it by just not showing prices.
An average store carries around 20,000 SKUs, so I understand that they’re looking for easier solutions to price updates, especially after having relatively high inflation after a couple of decades.
However, they’re already making it impossible for shoppers to track prices, and we all know soon (left to their own devices) they’re going to switch to individual pricing.
I’m surprised that the pricing issue is not being discussed in the context of online shopping already, with home deliveries on the rise.
In my country prices are often wrong because supermarkets are run by a small team of literal teenagers (one of the downsides of having decent minimum wages is that nobody wants to hire anyone if they somehow can avoid it).
Surveillance pricing should be outright banned IMHO, but Cory Doctorow had an article earlier this week explaining all the ways this particular ban is broken [1].
It was probably broken by design, allowing the politicians to brag about how they're doing something, while the lobbyists managed to carve out such large loopholes for themselves that it will in likelihood never be a real deterrent.
For example: surveillance pricing is allowed if users opt-in so consider how many times you've clicked "I agree" on websites recently to get past some legalese wall of text blocking you from the content.
Another thing is you can't sue a grocery store, but you can petition the AG to sue them, which they will do only if they feel like it.
Not to mention that it applies only to grocery stores, not hotels and airlines and other industries which are inclined to do surveillance pricing
[1] https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/30/something-must-be-done/
Why grocery stores only? It’s also unclear how this will change anything - don’t the grocery stores in richer areas already charge more? I’ve noticed Whole Foods prices are not the same across all stores even in the same state.
You're thinking of pricing zones—shoppers in Zone A pay a different price than those in Zone B. This makes sense, for example, if shipping costs are higher in Zone B.
The bill in question is about per-shopper pricing (e.g, you and I pay different prices in the same store). This is something Lyft and Uber do, but it's not really possible in retail.
Price targeting can help the poor in some cases and hurt them in others. For essentials where the need to purchase is high and the provider has a semi-monopoly, dynamic pricing leaves everyone worse off. For instance, think of groceries where there is only one store nearby or medicines with only one producer.
On the other hand, for something like a Netflix subscription, price discrimination DOES tend to help the poor users out. Netflix is 10x cheaper in third world countries for the exact same product. If they were forced to charge the same price everywhere, they would just charge everyone the US price and foreign users would be left out.
For impact most likely. Dynamic pricing is core to the budget airline industry and such a law would hurt them more, especially with the thin margins. It happens with games too, but the price of games doesn't affect how someone eats.
They charge more for everyone there. Now they are able to charge more for you
Because the sole driver of all of this is the UFCW. That's why only grocery stores.
Because they're still mad they think it "takes away jobs" to put in electronic ink price tags.
That's it. They came up with the rest of the FUD and latched onto clueless lawmakers.
Grocery stores have smaller margins and more options compared to pretty much any industry, yet politicians seem to think they are the cause of all of our ills.
Grocery stores have tiny margins and that's great. Let's keep it that way, it benefits all consumers. One way to prevent them from expanding their margins is to ban so-called "dynamic pricing".
It’s just pandering to voters who don’t know better. See: price of eggs in the last election.
I'm always shocked at how much anti-capitalism and anti-competition there is in the US.
I was taught that the power of consumer choice could reign in markets, but when I look around I see more and more companies working harder and harder to make themselves completely insulated from consumer choice.
Now our darlings are companies that are like massive prisons that promise that everyone will be interned in in the future.
Al major chains in my area use Covid/etc to increase prices beyond what supply dictates to profit off of crises, except for king soopers.
https://qz.com/supermarket-prices-grocery-food-inflation-pan...
No, grocery stores will be the weakest entry point to have the customer get used to get individual pricing. It's not the store owners themselves but big data businesses who do the pricing for them. Essentially taking the freedom away from the shops even further while at the same time squeezing even more money out of customers. This totally distorts supply and demand.
Why just grocery stores? Why not ban selling or purchasing our information to and from data brokers. Like for all uses.
Because this kind of price discrimination doesn’t require selling or purchasing data from data brokers. If you buy enough from Instacart, they can and do build it all in-house.
This is like responding to symptoms and not addressing the root cause. This is something that should be fixed by supply and demand, buyers should have a choice where to buy and sellers should have a choice how to price their products.
These problems arise when dealing with a monopoly, that undermines the free market and that's a far worse systemic problem and the root cause of these issues. AI has nothing to do with it.
There is an imbalance in leverage and timing though. Dynamic pricing requires a lot of real time and historical data; companies can access and share that information easily, and you as a consumer cannot.
Even in areas with multiple competitors, they can (and do) effectively collude by getting their information through data brokers and third parties.
I don't have a solution, but we are currently very far away from a free market in general.
There is no monopoly. Grocers are incredibly competitive and have low single digit margins (~1-3%)
There are things you can do to lower prices like prosecuting theft. In this case technology is part of the solution. Adding red tape and restricting technology will do the opposite.
Good! Surveillance pricing needs to be regulated, it distorts supply and demand massively because one party (pricing service providers, big chain stores) has a MASSIVE information advantage other the others (end customers and small shop owners). It's going to finalize the transition from a free market to a oligopoly in the retail sector. It's basically socialism for a few powerful corporations.
Doesn't this then open a market for "vpn style" apps that make everyone look broke? Get the lowest prices (ie market/baseline) on every interaction from food delivery to airplane tickets?
That then leads to a cat and mouse chase, and in the end the big corporations will win by forcing you to tie your real identity to your shopping identity, which won’t turn off enough consumers to meaningfully impact the bottom line.
You've actually got that backwards - being wealthy makes your time and effort worth more (to you) than the half-hour you'd spend price-comparing every item in the cart for each price difference (each between $0.03 and $2.00), while being poor makes price comparisons much more worth it
Being more financially stable means you pay higher prices, in this scenario
They’ll require ID verification for everything. Like they are normalizing with age verification for social media
Wait, isn't this prohibited already? Some of it may be a gray zone, but a good portion of it is already downright illegal in many countries, and the rest is extremely unethical.
> Merchants face fines of $10,000 for running afoul of the law, and penalties of $25,000 for repeat offenses.
Another limp-wristed penalty. Why not something like "$1,000 per dollar that you received as payment for prices in violation"? Customer buys a $5 can of beans that was AI-priced, you owe $5,000. They buy another can, you owe another $5,000. You have it set for the whole store, wham, you now owe 1,000 times your gross revenue for that day. Better damn well not do it.
I'd like to see fair pricing for airlines tickets too.
They should leave dynamic pricing. The rich could then hire poor people to do their shopping. Everybody wins. This is semi sarcastic. In chasing absolute maximum returns they open themselves for eventual gaming of the system.
This doesn't look like a cure for cancer like I was promised.
What about just setting the stores in high income areas to have higher prices?
> The practice — supported by artificial intelligence and known as dynamic pricing or surveillance pricing — can lead to two consumers paying different amounts for the same item from the same retailer, at roughly the same time.
Is an if-statement considered AI?
So membership discounts should be banned?
Why share locked articles? Why would you do such a thing?
The end goal must be to emulate US healthcare where nobody knows what things cost and you find out only months or years after buying.
That shit is evil
This seems sort of meaningless since supply/demand is the ultimate ai. Does this effectively mandate price controls? If so thank fucking GOD
AI is not a technology. It's a (shitty) political artefact of control, to bring people to pay more, own less, depend on a few capitalist owners for their livelihoods.
We must fight it
Can we do the same for DRAM prices please?
Isn't this level of price discrimination in a round about way just a worse form of communism? If the algo decides you can pay X% of your worth for an item, and X% of my worth for the same item even though the absolute dollar amounts are different, isn't that strange?
Isn't the Free Market already a form of AI that does exactly that? How can you ban tools for measuring the value of things?
Yesterday in Lidl I was a bit shocked seeing the coupons offered by their app. They did a really good job with their mixture of stuff I had bought or might buy.