Like, prices are displayed on the shelf for everyone to see. And they have to match what you pay at checkout.
So how the heck would a grocery store even do this? And this law is specifically around grocery stores.
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.
Also, this law excludes loyalty programs and promotional offers, which seems to be the main way that groceries have engaged in dynamic pricing in reality -- the advertised price doesn't change, but they give certain people certain coupons. And of course, my parents were clipping coupons from newspapers decades ago, as richer people couldn't be bothered, whereas people trying to make ends meet was clip and save religiously.
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.
That's already illegal, as indicated by your link about the ongoing lawsuits.
Phones have been randomizing and rotating MAC addresses for a long time. With enough antenna arrays you could theoretically track an individual RF source through the store but you wouldn't be able to tie it to a returning customer or identity by itself.
The days of easy external phone tracking are long over.
Your scenario is more than just a software update and dotting some i's. Pulling this off would require a lot of hardware and compute.
The best you could do is force everyone to scan prices through their phone with an app registered to them. You probably won't have many customers left when everyone gets tired of pointing their phone at everything to see their custom price.
But if both me and another person are standing in front of the prosciutto and cured meats fridge, we're seeing the same prices, even if I'm poor and they're rich.
The personalized pricing is usually by having everyone pay through an app. The app knows your buying history and tracks everything you do so they can fine tune their deals for you, surfacing discounts on things that pull you into the store, running e-coupons when it knows you're price conscious, etc. etc.
Both systems are fair on the surface but exploit the asymmetry of billion dollar information systems vs the average consumer. All of these tweaks ensure they get the maximum amount of money that they can out of their customer base which means on average everyone ends up paying more, all while being very hard to point to exactly how you got screwed.
Congratulations!
- 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
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.
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.
Dynamic pricing means sometimes you go there, and Wendy's decides on the fly whether you get a lower price and how much. It gives Wendy's the option to pinch pennies how they see fit for their own benefit, rather than offering a deal which you can choose to accept.
It was store-wide with updated prices shown clearly. Yes it could change on a daily basis, but you would also expect it to be roughly predictable because the whole point is to get more people to come in when it's cheaper.
Saying that Wendy's is "pinching pennies" doesn't make any sense.
(Yes, I understand that Wendy's claimed it was only ever going to be used for discounts. But frankly, I don't believe them. The temptation to increase prices is just too powerful to ignore for a profit-maximizing MBA.)
Fast food prices are pretty sticky. We consumers don’t like anything changing or being dynamic. But it is was a communications failure. If they slowly raised the prices then announced time based discounts, like how a happy hour works then it probably would have been fine. Sonic does this. But dynamic and surge pricing means I never know what it’s going to cost until I’m ordering. That’s obviously a stupid strategy for budget dining.
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.
It seems like QR codes are growing in popularity as a way to look up more product details, user reviews, etc. -- especially at electronics stores.
But the idea of prices being hidden entirely doesn't seem to exist anywhere in normal consumer stores. There seem to have been some store experiments and retail "concepts" (prototypes not rolled out), but it seems like the consumer backlash is extremely strong so these experiments have stopped. Consumers want to be able to browse prices, that's pretty fundamental.
I also saw this in a gas station convenience store near me but I did not take a photo. I haven't seen it in a real grocery store yet.
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.
https://epic.org/krogers-surveillance-pricing-harms-consumer...
Where are you shopping? I get groceries the most I've seen is 30 people at a time.
> How will the can of peas know which price to display
People are talking about facial recognition and smart phones driving this. What they're missing is that your shopping cart is likely to contain a selection of items which make it _highly unique_. Not just on the day you're shopping but across large spans of time.
Of course the lowest tech is I can just put a tracker in your cart or in your basket.
That's how
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.
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?
This is the way, but also, places like eBay are increasingly “professionalized” by huge resellers and refurbishers who squeeze out any possible margin. I’ve also noticed that thrift and consignment stores aren’t such a bargain anymore. You can often get a better deal from large retailers when they go on clearance.
P2P transactions still pay off but it’s not as easy as it used to be.
eBay is still worthwhile for some items, but lots of the "deals" on actual used product have moved to other marketplaces like Poshmark.
Shipping kills all of it, however.
I'm sure someone is working on an AI powered toaster though, and we'll be able to achieve the ultimate goal of a talking toaster as they had in the TV show Red Dwarf. Hopefully it'll use Claude tokens while it engages intelligently with us.
And 100% of these products and features are trash, as are the companies pushing them.
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.
To be clear, I don't believe that (or even the premise that "making capitalism work" is a good social goal--some elements of capitalist economies are socially beneficial, but adopting it as an ideology rather than piecemeal is not). I think your point is generally correct: if your goal is an efficient free market, then price transparency is important. But that's just my hunch as to what the counterargument would be.
In this case, plenty of places in the US only have one reasonably close grocery store.
There are plenty of downsides to that, and I don't agree or think it's beneficial, on balance. But "citizens require a lack of surveillance" is far from the present-day truth, or even remotely practical as an aspiration.
Like, basically how an exchange works. We should go massively capitalistic with purchasing everything, even gum.
Demand price-point for antibiotics across the community when the average use-case is a road rash? Low.
Demand price-point for antibiotics for a community member with a life-threatening lung infection? Asymptotically higher.
See also: home insurance during wildfires, water during a drought/heatwave, masks during a pandemic.
While I agree with the intent of this law, I don't think it will be effective. If you have a system capable of jacking prices up you can just multiply this calculated delta by -1 transform that into a discount.
To effectively prevent this practice you probably need to ban any kind of personal discount. I don't think we will ever see such law, nor do I think this would be a good idea.
Maryland’s law bans grocers and third-party delivery services from using a person’s personal data to set higher prices.Why isn't this a good idea?
It would also be costly to police.
If the problem is that a grocery store has a monopoly in an area, then that is a different problem fixed by adding grocery store(s).
Sure, haggling was historically the standard but that just isn't the way these modern operations work. If an outdated practice gets caught in the crossfire when protecting consumers from imminent harm I'm okay with that.
(But I understand this isn't really relevant to the article or discussion here.)
You should justify why it is improving price (or something) for consumers if you want to hold it up as an example.
They've been doing it for years; it's called "financial aid". It is literally the textbook example of how to get people to pay different amounts for the same thing based on what they are willing or able to pay.
It's also why the recent shift in immigration policy has affected top-tier universities so much: domestic education is, by and large, subsidized by international students who are almost exclusively admitted on a need-aware basis, allowing the schools to ensure the financials work out on paper.
Now that there's been a huge drop in international applications, they need to make up the loss in revenue, so they're shifting those costs back to domestic applicants.
I can hardly claim omniscience but my understanding is that by and large universities bin students into broad categories and apply a uniform rate schedule based on demonstrated financial need (plus academic performance in some limited cases), with international students generally billed at the highest rate.
The thing is nobody will pay more than the advertised price so they want to not list a higher price, and then offer discounts. They do it via coupons and other mechanisms, but they'll never get anyone to pay $20 for a $5 bottle of Coke.
Or, gasp, cut bloat.
You have to report it, and then maybe the office of the Attorney General _might_ impose a fine on the grocery store:
https://governor.maryland.gov/news/press/pages/governor-moor...
> Governor Moore’s proposal builds on the Maryland Online Data Privacy Act of 2024 by specifically targeting the intersection of data surveillance and essential goods pricing. Under the new legislation, violations would be treated as an unfair or deceptive trade practice under the Maryland Consumer Protection Act. The Office of the Attorney General would enforce the measure, with merchants subject to civil penalties of up to $10,000 for a first offense and up to $25,000 for subsequent offenses.
If a grocer has the finances to deploy a system like this, they're close to the size of Kroger / Walmart. These fines are way too low.
> 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...
Margins on items at grocery stores is pretty thin. For them to be able to offer 50¢ or $1 off for items by using their app, that tells me that they are making more than that much from the data about me. My suspicion is that they're earning at least 10x that much from the data.
What it is is that the people who are price-conscious will clip the coupons and use the loyalty - those who are not will not.
Go to a food market in a developing country, and that is how it works. Everyone is haggling for everything all the time.
I can’t seem to square the positions.
Internet initially helped consumers with knowledge. Now that balance has shifted to more and more corporations knowing more.
If we enshrine into law significant privacy expectations, that can restore the knowledge balance.
But if you believe in anti-trust, regulation, and competition as external checks (typically enacted through governments) on capitalism's power - then you can indeed square the two positions.
Disclaimer: my father was in the oil business and we lived a lot in the Middle East among other places.
That's a simplistic example, but we've been lectured about consumer choices, invisible hands of marketplaces, demand curves and marginal value for so long I'm genuinely shocked that ill-defined "predatory pricing" is the issue we see in the news.
Some thought experiments for you:
1. This store is located between your employer and your home. The time is "right after typical working hours". The presumption that the algorithm can predict is that you're picking something up from the store to make for dinner, therefore you have no time to price shop and therefore we can charge you more because you have to have it now.
2. American shoppers tend to have very high brand loyalty. If you always buy product_A and never product_B, then the algorithm can charge you more for product_A because your demand is quite inflexible.
This post of mine from a few days ago has links you might be interested in: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47848128
> I'm genuinely shocked that ill-defined "predatory pricing" is the issue we see in the news.
There are lots of evil people out there working very hard at extracting more than their fair share of wealth from others. Far too many people believe in the "Just World Hypothesis" - that "what goes around comes around". There are lots of random bad things and bad people that hurt innocent people. There might actually be some positive benefit that could come from surveillance pricing. However, once you've known or worked with some of the more predatory people then you'll see just how hard this technology can be used to screw others.
It appears so, yes. And prime pays more per item.
>In short, an Amazon listing features prices not only offered by Amazon, but by other sellers. Some of these sellers may offer the items at a lower price, but the order will not be fulfilled by Amazon and won’t be subject to Prime’s shipping discounts and faster delivery.
If you're a prime member and logged it, it will prioritize purchases fulfilled by amazon and delivered with prime delivery. If you click "Other sellers on amazon" there will sometimes be sellers that are cheaper with shipping than purchasing through prime.
ETA: Aldi here is representing any store without a loyalty program
A significantly more complex hypothetical that I don't think anyone is doing yet: With digital price tags and customer tracking you could show different prices to different customers in-person. For example, when Alice goes to the eggs it could say $2 and when Bob goes to the eggs it could say $4. Then you just need to track the customer to the register to make sure you give them the price that was displayed. I believe the amazon "go" stores were doing the whole customer tracking thing so we already have the necessary tech demonstrated in real stores.
This is already happening at Lidl. I was standing in line one day and the lady in front of me asked if I had the app, because there was something like a $5 off $50 purchase coupon in there I could use. I did have the app and checked, but my coupon instead was for $15 off $150.
Thinking a little more deeply about it, every time I go there I tend to spend an average of around $125. My hypothesis is that they have that data and know a customer's average spend, so they tailor the coupon's dollar amounts to the customer to entice them to spend slightly more than they usually do.
This already happens. We've been getting personalized coupons from our local store for 15+ years now.
There are three tiers of discount. There are general special offers, advertised widely, to get people through the door. Then there are members only discounts, advertised in store, to get people to be members. Then there are mailed to members personal discounts that are uncannily accurate for what is running out to get you to go shopping now instead of later. These days the hand scanners and apps also tell you what coupons you have so you don’t need mail but junk mail is still regular.
TBH as a shopper it works great.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...
>> Since 2021 homicide numbers have down trended, reaching a 13-year low of 201 in 2024. Between 2021 and November 2025 there was a 61% reduction in homicides. In 2025 Baltimore recorded 133 homicides, its lowest in nearly 50 years.
"Unconscionable contracts" and "Usury" called--you're behind on your debt and your kidney is being seized. :p
There's also some not-so-fun history there when it comes to charging people based on their skin-color.
Some of these loans are outright predatory, with multi-thousand-percent interest rates. These aren't loans that people who have better options are taking, and moreover I think a lot of people really don't understand how horrible that can be. Call your congressperson to get more funding for math education, and then maybe we can argue we should get rid of usury laws.
I guess I feel like the term "consent" is weaponized; did people opt into these loans? Sure, I suppose in a sense, but these are extremely desperate people and it is hard to say that what they opted into is "consent" in the classic sense of the term. They only take these loans because they feel like they don't have other options, not because they were able to compare rates across different banks and choose the best, and upon accepting these loans they can very easily get into situations where paying off the debt is functionally impossible.
Not sure how I feel about selling organs so I won't touch that one.
That also leads into complex questions like "is it really consent if the alternative is X", or "can someone consent to chattel slavery", or "at what point is chemical addiction no longer consensual", etc.
_______________
> "I should not agree with your young [socialistic] friends," said Marcus curtly, "I am so old-fashioned as to believe in free contract."
> "I, being older, perhaps believe in it even more," answered [Monsieur] Louis smiling. "But surely it is a very old principle of law that a leonine contract is not a free contract. And it is hypocrisy to pretend that a bargain between a starving man and a man with all the food is anything but a leonine contract." He glanced up at the fire-escape, a ladder leading up to the balcony of a very high attic above. "I live in that garret; or rather on that balcony. If I fell off the balcony and hung on a spike, so far from the steps that somebody with a ladder could offer to rescue me if I gave him a hundred million francs, I should be quite morally justified in using his ladder and then telling him to go to hell for his hundred million. Hell, indeed, is not out of the picture; for it is a sin of injustice to force an advantage against the desperate. Well, all those poor men are desperate; they all hang starving on spikes. If they must not bargain collectively, they cannot bargain at all. You are not supporting contract; you are opposing all contract; for yours cannot be a real contract at all."
-- The Paradoxes of Mr. Pond by GK Chesterton [https://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks05/0500421h.html]
I do pretty ok now, but in 2016, I was completely broke. I was unemployed for awhile, but even after becoming employed it felt like I couldn't catch up with my debt. Even though I know they're basically scams, and I know how to calculate compound interest, and I know math better than the average American, I still considered one of those scammy payday loan places, just because the high interest was "Tom in a few month from now"'s problem. Fortunately I didn't have to go that far, and things did pick up, and I feel lucky for that.
I think about that situation a lot; it was a very humbling moment. I guess I hadn't fully realized beforehand that the right combination of circumstances can really make people who would otherwise know better make objectively bad decisions.
Life is already pretty hard even when things are going fine. We don't need assholes weaponizing circumstances for when they aren't.
Banning an employment model should be unconstitutional.