I grew up assuming that a price tag was a kind of promise. The number on the shelf was the number for everyone. The wealthy shopper and the college kid paid the same for a gallon of milk, and if you wanted a better deal you clipped a coupon or waited for a sale. Lately I have been thinking about how fragile that assumption has become, and how quietly it is being tested.
The term for what worries people is “surveillance pricing.” It means using what a company knows about you, your location, your browsing, your purchase history, to estimate the most you would be willing to pay, and then charging you that. Bloomberg ran a segment last week warning that it may be coming to a store near you, and CBS reported this week on how retailers could pair AI with personal data to do exactly that.
What struck me in reading through the coverage is how much of the fight is happening before anyone has shown the practice is widespread. In January 2025, the Federal Trade Commission published findings from a study of firms that sell pricing tools, including Mastercard, Accenture, and McKinsey. Those intermediaries worked with at least 250 clients, and their systems could draw on precise location, demographics, and abandoned shopping carts. But as TokenPost noted in its summary, the FTC material showed the technology exists, not that a specific retailer charged a specific customer more for the same item.
There has been at least one concrete case. Last December, Consumer Reports and the Groundwork Collaborative found that Instacart shoppers were seeing price differences of up to 23 percent on some products, which they estimated could cost a family more than $1,200 a year. Instacart ended the practice.
Lawmakers have not waited for more examples. Maryland's ban on personalized grocery pricing took effect on October 1, the first of its kind. It is narrow, covering large food retailers and delivery apps, and only staple foods, not candy or hot meals. Connecticut passed a law with an interesting twist: businesses outside of retail that use personal data to raise a price have to say so, in capital letters, “THIS PRICE WAS INCREASED USING YOUR PERSONAL DATA.” New Jersey enacted its own measure in July, Seattle has moved on a grocery ordinance, and New York legislators passed a broader bill this summer. By one count, more than 40 bills on the subject were introduced in statehouses this year.
Walmart, which plans to have digital shelf labels in all of its U.S. stores by the end of this year, has been working hard to get ahead of the suspicion. CEO John Furner wrote to customers that the company does not “set different prices based on who you are or the time of day, and we won't.” Its corporate affairs chief, Dan Bartlett, put it more crisply: “We price products, not people.” The company says the digital tags simply let it update thousands of prices without staff swapping paper labels by hand, which is a reasonable thing to want.
I find myself holding two thoughts at once. The first is that personalized pricing is not inherently sinister. Airlines, hotels, and student discounts have long meant different people paying different amounts, and some advocates argue that tailored prices could even help shoppers with less money if they are used to cut prices rather than raise them. Banning a technology before it does harm can also freeze out uses we have not imagined yet.
The second thought is that groceries are different. Food is not a luxury purchase where a little extraction at the margins hurts nobody. And the deal at the heart of a posted price is trust. FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson, appointed by President Trump, made the point simply when his agency sought public comment on the issue this summer: consumers who see a listed price expect it to be the same price everyone else sees. Once that expectation goes, every purchase becomes a negotiation you did not know you were in, against a counterpart that knows far more about you than you know about it.
What I keep coming back to is that the companies themselves seem to understand this. Walmart is not promising restraint out of charity. It is promising it because it knows shoppers would walk if they believed the shelf was reading them. Markets can discipline this, as long as people can see it happening. That is the real case for disclosure rules like Connecticut's. Not every personalized price is wrong, but nobody should have to wonder.
I would rather live in a world where the price tag is still a promise. It looks like we may have to write that promise into law to keep it.
Thoughts? Reach me at danielk@outlook.com.