Maryland becomes first state to ban surveillance pricing in grocery stores | Hacker News Reader

Maryland becomes first state to ban surveillance pricing in grocery stores

theguardian.com

339 points01-_-205 comments

Sadly, this article doesn't explain how this "surveillance pricing" (which is just a scarier-sounding synonym for "dynamic pricing") would even work in a physical grocery store.

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.

> 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.

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

That's already illegal, as indicated by your link about the ongoing lawsuits.

Doesn't that depend on the state? I'm almost sure there are quite a few states that allow stores to charge a higher price at checkout than what the product is labeled with on the shelf.

That’s fraud, plain and simple. There are already laws against that. No more specific laws are needed.

Fraud: “a deliberate act of deception, misrepresentation, or concealment of material facts intended to gain an unauthorized benefit—typically money or property—while causing loss to another party.”

Isn't it common for state sales taxes to be added at the till? (I don't live in the US but that seemed to be what happened on my visits there)

Sales tax is a government imposed requirement that's not included in prices in the US, so there's no misrepresentation and no fraud. If that's what the commenter above was talking about, they're confused about what's being discussed.

Seems not contradictory to say that it legally has to match what you pay, when that is the content of the lawsuit against them, implying that their actions are illegal. Many states also already impose a stiff additional penalty for this practice (e.g. item must be sold heavily discounted or given free to any consumer that observes that the price charged at checkout differs from a price posted in the store)

But that's already illegal. And it's not dynamic pricing.

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.

> Technology to track individual customers through the store based on smartphone RF is already deployed in many supermarkets.

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.

You're already watched by security cameras, it's not hard to do facial recognition anymore. And you have companies literally lining up to sell such facial recognition databases. It's conceivable they could determine what price you pay for groceries while your car is on the way to the store, thanks to Flock.

Disney Parks patented tracking via shoes and groups of people/families based on scanning their shoes upon park entry to build an index of guests. Not sure how and where it was all applied during park visits for guests but you're definitely correct that facial recognition upon store entry to kickoff a live dynamic profiling of a customer is what's currently being beta tested/deployed by some retailers.

Why would they need to do that when you are already wearing an RFID bracelet?

I still don't understand how that would work. Yes, e-ink is great for updating prices, I welcome it at grocery stores.

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.

I think they're conflating/confusing a bunch of different things here. E-ink tags let stores run sales more often, offer "happy hour" time of day discounts, etc. It's not so much individualized (other than probably some demographic targeting, like raising prices 5-6 pm when well employed people are picking stuff up on the way home).

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.

The economy requires companies to be mind readers to function optimally [0], which is impossible, so they choose the less invasive option of harvesting all your data.

[0] One of the core foundations of neoclassical economics is unbounded rationality which includes the ability to predict the future.

The UFCW's defense is that e-ink price tags "take away skilled work". I have no clue what intense high-ELO skill is required to stick a sticker onto a shelf, but I'm sure they can figure out how to stick an E-ink tag up instead and how to replace some batteries.

In my state there are laws requiring the price charged at the register to mark what's displayed on the shelf, with the store paying a penalty (price * some multiplier) to a customer who has been charged more than the displayed price. If the prices were constantly changing there would definitely be some people trying to game the system or suing because they feel the store had been doing something unfair. I can't see automatic price gouging working out in a physical store at all.

Just show a barcode. Scan to reveal your personal price. Maybe bundle it with coupons to make people accept it easier.

This already exists at Target - scan each item as you put it in your card, and note the ones that are "cheaper when ordered online for in-store pickup" and complain at the register and get your discount.

Congratulations!

IME there usually isn't much contention looking at the same section of shelf. If I'm looking at the cured meats, I'm the only person looking at any shelves within 6ft either direction. Other nearby people are walking past, looking at shelves on the opposite side of the aisle, waiting for me to finish before checking the meats, etc. The algorithm doesn't have to optimize for literally every person/sale to still have a lot of impact.

They don't have to be that specific. They can look at you and the other customers in the store in aggregate, and raise/lower prices accordingly.

If you're poor and you're a in store full of millionaires, you'll end up paying millionaire prices, unless it's for an item the millionaires rarely buy.

Well that's easy enough - don't apply sneaky pricing when there's two people looking.

This arms race accelerates quickly. The question becomes stopping someone observing from a distance. It would have to be very tight to go unnoticed, and it seems likely to me that when detected it would quickly become a costly PR SNAFU, in addition to the cost of all the tech you need to deploy. I'd guess that grocers have little disposable capital anyway, given how low profits tend to be.

They just get rid of the prices on the shelves.

Nobody will shop there then. They've tested this and consumers will go elsewhere unless you're selling super luxury goods.

In my town of 100,000 people there are four options. A universally high priced grocery, a dirt cheap, goods at our near their sell by date with the expected low quality grocery, a gas station convenience store, or a bunch of mid-tier grocers with a few different names all owned by the same parent company.

Many places would dream of my "options".

Oh believe me. If that parent company was dumb enough to remove prices from items, and if that is even legal in your state, then a competitor would enter very quickly, making a big deal advertising about how it displays prices, and everyone would start doing their shopping at that competing mid-tier grocery store. Because that's how capitalism works.

You are making the fundamental mistake of thinking that the current equilibrium of local stores will continue to persist once some of the stores make a deep and fundamental change to their business. That is obviously not the case. It would create a gigantic strategic opportunity for competitors. And competitors really like finding strategic opportunities where they can make a bunch of money now where they couldn't before.

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

As a person who can't help being cheap, I do use all the fast food apps, and hate the dog-slowness of each one of them. It has been really interesting though, to see immediately when someone at McD or Wendy's HQ turns the discounting knob. McDonalds turned theirs down (for me?? who knows?) years ago, and Wendy's (sometime last year?) abruptly curtailed what used to be a really worthwhile regime (often giving any of a small burger, a drink, or fries for free with purchase) to one that usually just gives $1 off an item.

> 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 difference is that early-bird pricing is transparent and predictable. There is a written, known policy of $X discount during specific hours. You can plan for it. It's never a surprise.

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.

I can't tell if you're implying that Wendy's was going to offer different prices to different customers "on the fly", but that wasn't the case.

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.

So... you just apparate at Wendy's instantly without cost when you decide to go? Most of us aren't so lucky. We need to travel there, which takes time and resources. Sometimes we decide to go through the drive-through and there are 5 cars in front of us and soon 3 more behind us blocking us in. When prices are 20% higher than you expected when you finally get to order, do you leave and waste all that time? Do you pay 20% extra, giving them money for nothing? Economically, both of those options are losses.

(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.)

I genuinely don't know what you're talking about.

I mean, I go to a place like McDonald's probably once a week when I'm starving and it's convenient. Their prices change all the time. The item that had a big promotion last week no longer has one this week. On the other hand, there is a new item on the menu that has a big promotion this week. And because I went to a different McDonald's today than I did last week, the prices are all different anyways, often by as much as two dollars.

You seem to be assuming that fast food prices are already known and predictable when they're not. What you usually do is decide you're in the mood for Wendy's, go there, look at the different prices and different promotions and decide what will most satisfy you while being the cheapest. Maybe you were in the mood for a bacon cheeseburger but they have a promotion where double cheeseburgers are 40% off so you get that instead.

Why you are bringing in travel time doesn't really make a lot of sense to me. And the whole point of dynamic pricing is that they want it to be somewhat predictable, so you know that if you show up at 3:30 p.m. you're going to save a couple of bucks compared to if you show up at 12:15 p.m. Like, it's not rocket science to figure out at what times a restaurant is going to be less busy.

You've never had to budget tightly, then? When I was in college, I knew what my typical order at every restaurant near campus would cost me, to the cent. It was a big deal in how I planned my days. Something costing $1 more could blow my budget for the month - and did, a few times. I can't imagine how miserable it would have been trying to balance all the various factors if prices were basically randomized.

I know a fair number of people who still have to plan to that degree. It's not a foreign idea for them. It's their daily life.

I'd begrudgingly pay the extra dollar and stop going for lunch

Not fast food though. We have different expectations at different types of establishments

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.

It wasn’t really interpreted as “cheaper than normal from this time to this time” but as “we’re increasing meal prices during rush hours, at our sole discretion, whenever we feel like it. Too bad if you paid $4.99 yesterday at the same time, today it’s $7.99 because more people are physically here.” Even if that wasn’t quite how it was going to work, that’s all anyone heard.

They were wanting to charge more during the rush and not just give discounts. It was closer to Uber's surge pricing.

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.

But how do you do that without people noticing? If I pick up a $40 bottle of wine, and it's suddenly $50 when I hit the register, that's fraudulent pricing - you advertised one price when I picked up the project, but a different one because Giovanni is now in the shop.

This problem already exists in retail. Pricing algorithms are easy to run, and paper tags are difficult to change frequently or in bulk. Every store will honor the posted price, but within that there’s still a range of responses between “make the customer happy” and “the onus is on the customer to prove that the register price is incorrect.” Digital signage really tips the scales against the customers proving that the price is wrong, but I expect that most companies will adopt policies closer to the “make the customer happy” end of the spectrum. It’s not worth fighting about $10, especially if you both know they’re right.

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.

I've looked online and can't find any real examples of QR code-only stores.

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.

You see it a lot in "Convenience Stores" at gas stations now. I refuse to purchase anything like this.

Here's an example (not mine): https://old.reddit.com/r/mildlyinfuriating/comments/1s0n9al/...

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.

There's a store in my neighborhood that only does app purchases and a little robot brings it out to your car. It's nice getting cilantro that hasn't been picked over by a hundred people, but I don't like shopping for groceries online, and AFAIK you can't actually enter the store.

I think this would be illegal in many places. A number of states require prices to be visibly posted, and some also require unit price to be shown.

So we’re now going to spend several hours at the grocery store, scanning every item and waiting for some app to come back with a custom price?

Interested know which stores are doing this QR code for pricing thing (and what area of the country).

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.

That sounds like a "fantastic" shopping experience. No thanks.

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.

There has been a lot of consolidation in the industry over the past decade. There are three major grocery "brands" in my city. All of them have the same parent company. Quitting one store to go to another is about as effective as the people who boycotted Bud Light by switching to Modelo.

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.

"Pricematch" is also common in the UK for traditional stores like Sainsburys Tesco competing with Lidl and Aldi 'discounters'.

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.

That's basically an urban legend about vacation prices being different between iPhones and Android. It's not a thing.

A bunch of people claimed it happened to them and it sounded sinister and plausible so it's spread a lot on social media.

But there is no actual evidence of it and lots of people, including journalists, have tried to reproduce it and failed.

And the thing is, it's really easy to pull up a flight today on an old android and see a cheap fare, and then pull it up on your Mac a day later and see it's much more expensive, and not realize that the reason for the price difference is because the cheap seats sold out and only the expensive ones are left.

Facial recognition

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

How is this supposed to work? There’s hundreds of people in the store. Someone is always right next to me. How will the can of peas know which price to display

> There’s hundreds of people in the store.

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.

Midwest Walmarts, Meijer’s, Costco etc very often have hundreds of shoppers.

So we’re going to see a price and by the time we get to the register all the prices will have changed? And that’s not going to cause a bunch of commotion and demands for price checks at the checkout?

> So we’re going to see a price and by the time we get to the register all the prices will have changed?

I think the design of the system entails that the price you see and the price you pay would be the same. It's just that different customers are going to see different prices.

Then the question is how do they track you from the time you picked the item to the time you scan it. Which is what I was opining on.

> demands for price checks

What would that look like in modern commerce? There is no "big book" of prices. The best you can do is go back to the shelf and say the price is wrong.

Now you're debating which is the actual store price? The one on the shelf or the one on the computer? Stores are not generally obliged to honor mistaken prices although they may be in some states. Famously Arizona Iced tea is not actually 99c everywhere it's sold.

It's then a game of chicken and most consumers will probably lose.

If they profile all of the people in the store simultaneously, they can raise/lower prices based on time of day and item purchased. Then you won't see the prices changing constantly as people walk around the stores, they'll just change gradually throughout the day, when people aren't looking.

If all the people who work at Goldman Sachs next door to the store get off work at 6pm, the store can raise steak prices at 6pm while lowering the price of Oreos (or whatever). It doesn't even have to be based on economic class statistics, it can be tailored to the specific times when individual people shop at the store and which items they buy.

>"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")

Dynamic pricing and surveillance pricing are two different things, e.g. reduce price for fresh produce by x% 1 hour becore the store closes = dynamic pricing. Surveillance pricing is based on personal data of the individual customer (browser history etc.) which, when applied to groceries is basically everything Instacart does.

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.

Pricing will become increasingly adversarial. The Internet did too much to expose price differences to customers, so sellers are responding. Customers will need aggressive agents to price-shop on their behalf. Take hotel booking as one of the current nightmares of price visibility. Total price often isn't exposed until you show up at the hotel.

>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?

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

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.

That's good to know regarding ebay. I don't use it much, but I wasn't aware. Agreed with regard to thrift stores. Some of them have seen quite a lot of inflation. I think it's yard sales and minimalism for me.

Even those have price-constraints - if you watch for awhile you get a real feel for the prices that people will pay vs the "value" if you will. Certain thrift stores will be dirt cheap, others (Goodwill) will be barely below Walmart - sometimes you can even scratch the price off and find a clearance sticker for lower under it.

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.

Buying used is great and all, but so many more products and product features have become cloud and subscription reliant across all industries. They'll be able to get you profiled and locked into a dynamically priced subscription eventually.

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.

>but so many more products and product features have become cloud and subscription reliant across

And 100% of these products and features are trash, as are the companies pushing them.

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

You're forgetting that consuming newly created products is the only way to express yourself or gain a modicum of fleeting happiness. Also, if you're not consuming, you can't "vote with your dollar" which is of course the most effective way in history for ordinary people to hold the powerful accountable.

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.

That's just called progress. What are you a Luddite or something?

Its pretty obvious that a society intent on making capitalism work would enforce price transparency. If you want a productive society, you need efficient markets, and if you want efficient markets, you need to reduce information asymmetry, not maximize it. Hopefully the people in power recognize the positive impact they can make by preventing this awful future.

I think the devil's advocate/libertarian reply would be roughly: its efficient to let consumers prefer venues with different pricing schemes. If dynamic pricing is bad, then competitors will differentiate by not doing it, and price out the ones doing dynamic pricing.

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.

The core issue with pure libertarian ideas is that they ignore "shoe leather costs" and the role they play in making consumers "irrational", which the success of a libertarian society depends on.

In this case, plenty of places in the US only have one reasonably close grocery store.

Sounds like something Macx character from the book Accelerando would do.

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

Citizens require a lack of surveillance. Full stop.

Citizens in the developed world have been heavily surveilled for decades. All of them. And the penetration/rate of increase of surveillance has been increasing rapidly.

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.

Citizens require the ability to surveil the watchers. When flock data was FOIAd for the politicians license plates the flock data was exempted from FOIA so fast.

The only legislation needed is one that requires transparent, searchable pricing. If the sellers can use automation to set prices, then buyers can use automation to sort prices, making all the pricing games moot.

Perhaps that is all that is required, but I don't want the minimum. I want a simple life with enough to live. I don't want to optimize everything and I don't want to live in a world which is trying to optimize every interaction I participate in.

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.

Inelasticity and segmenting "the community" is the problem here, like always.

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.

Sadly, there is no provision in this law to allow consumers to sue the companies.

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.

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...

If a state AG is required to do something it wont happen. Only creating a private right of action changes behavior.

> While the law bans setting higher prices through surveillance pricing, it doesn’t address reducing prices. If a company raises its prices for everyone, and then offers individualized discounts, “suddenly you’ve arrived at the same outcome,” McBrien says.

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.

Yeah, sounds like a law that's passed because it sounds/polls good (ie. "affordability"), even though it's addressing a non-existent problem and is trivial to work around.

Uber pays drivers differential rates depending on how desperate they believe the driver to be. I can believe that UberEats demands a higher premium depending on the item and what they infer about you.

Right, but the law mentioned in TFA is specifically for grocery stores

From TFA

  Maryland’s law bans grocers and third-party delivery services from using a person’s personal data to set higher prices.

That says nothing about the driver?

>I don't think we will ever see such law, nor do I think this would be a good idea.

Why isn't this a good idea?

Buyers and sellers should be able to negotiate prices however they want. It is how markets have worked since the dawn of human trading.

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).

This is a law about grocery stores. How much haggling do you think is happening at grocery stores?

I routinely ask the cashier for half off on anything that is perfectly fine but has less-than-pristine packaging. I usually get it.

(But I understand this isn't really relevant to the article or discussion here.)

Most markets have also had a wide variety of regulations. It seems perfectly reasonable to me that large retail operations would be prohibited from attempting a predatory scheme depending on individualized pricing. There's a tangible difference between one off purchase contracts and selling into the consumer market at large.

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.

Most pricing laws are built on the idea that this isn't OK. For example, I can't negotiate pricing directly with an automobile manufacturer. I have to go through a dealer so I am "protected".

There are special laws made to protect the dealer's position. This is an exception not the rule.

You should justify why it is improving price (or something) for consumers if you want to hold it up as an example.

That is a pretty good example of why these laws are not OK.

If you dig around in your hotel room the next time you're there, you'll likely find a statutory "list of prices" - often showing $1,000 or more per night for a room you paid $150 for.

In my experience, it's usually posted on the back of the door.

Is this why grocery stores are so keen to get you to use their coupon app or hand them your phone number? I always refuse, but I always wondered what they do with the data.

The amount of "discount" is so much that they must be getting a large income stream from the data. Whenever I see something where the shelf sticker claims a lower price for "digital coupon" (meaning: use their app), I put the item back onto the shelf and move on. I'm willing to use the loyalty cards, but I am not willing to allow the sort of surveillance data that phone apps provide.

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.

The dirty secret is there is no income stream from the app, and the data they recover isn't worth much.

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.

Yup, it's that simple. And effective. As I was raised pretty poor by most people's standards, I can't help but jump through whatever annoying hoops to save a buck. But there are a lot of well-off people who would find it kind of taboo to essentially digitally "clip coupons."

Yes, unfortunately as an example to the problem here my grocery store charges around 20-30% more for the privilege of not using the app. Eventually I relented because I needed the 'savings' and it was the only grocery store available to me.

One thing about "surveillance pricing" I've not seen addressed is that it destroys the usual model of demand curve. A given buyer may be judged to have the resources to pay a particular (high) price for a good, but other factors may be relevant: that buyer might need to save on good A in order to buy more of good B. The "surveillance pricer" would demand a higher price for good A because it has no information about need for good B by the buyer.

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.

You might think that grocery stores in poor neighborhoods have lower prices than wealthier neighborhoods (because poorer customers are more likely to shop around for bargains). The opposite is true. Wealthy customers have the time, energy and money to be able to shop around. Poor people are stuck in "food deserts".

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.

Gosh, I hope colleges don't find out about this pricing strategy.

> Gosh, I hope colleges don't find out about this pricing strategy.

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.

Yes, that's the joke. I think the parent post was sarcasm.

Provided the criteria are transparent and directly applicable I don't see the issue. I wouldn't object to a grocery store that offered standardized discounted rates if you applied with documentation of your financial situation. Whereas an opaque operation with the goal of maximizing the final bill on an individual basis using entirely arbitrary criteria is dystopian and clearly extremely consumer hostile.

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.

Grocery stores already do this! Why do you think there's "senior discount day"?

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.

I realize that. My point is that you can view university financial aid favorably while also being against individualized offers from retailers. The current or historical practices of grocery stores isn't the primary issue under contention here.

A coupon that you must be over a certain age to redeem is an entirely different beast than one which was sent only to you specifically with an individualized price based on opaque criteria aimed at directly and immediately optimizing revenue. It is entirely possible to outlaw the latter (though Maryland appears to have failed to accomplish that) without restricting the former.

> 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.

Or, gasp, cut bloat.

This sounds crazy! Makes budgeting impossible! Imagine someone is on low income and doesn’t know how much the grocery shopping will cost! Whoever came up with this should be burned

>Imagine someone is on low income and doesn’t know how much the grocery shopping will cost!

Go to a food market in a developing country, and that is how it works. Everyone is haggling for everything all the time.

Except with haggling, I can talk the price down to keep it in my budget. That's stressful and unnecessary really, but at least there is an avenue to lower the price inherent in the system.

Try haggling at somewhere like wal mart. Go to a cashier, or hell, the store manager and try to get them to reduce the price.

Sadly the law Maryland passed contains enough loopholes and preemptions that it is literally worse than having passed nothing at all.

I worry that increasingly sophisticated dynamic pricing could one day make it nearly impossible for anyone to get ahead.

Saturday afternoon and you want a steak? $300.

Considering we are getting there without it... yeah, definitely not looking good.

Is haggling an individualized price? What's stopping companies from allowing arbitrary bids on any item they can choose to reject? What if the future of the grocery store is eBay, a true nightmare.

Culturally, Americans do not haggle and do not to well in cultures where haggling is the norm. It would take a massive cultural shift before negotiating price is even close to normal. Part of this is why so many employees do poorly when negotiating salary during the interview process.

Disclaimer: my father was in the oil business and we lived a lot in the Middle East among other places.

Americans don't do well with anything perceived as confrontation, speaking in general terms. Haggling is on that list. It's why my son sold so damn much popcorn sitting outside of a grocery store for the boy scouts. He asked everyone, and a wide majority of people are too polite to just say no thank you.

I don't know why it is, because Americans are also pretty aggressive about certain topics. But confrontation, even low stakes like price haggling, is a problem.

or you will ask bids for your shopping list, and get replies from several retail chains (or, rather their AI agents).

More Perfect did a great investigation on this and Instacart

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=osxr7xSxsGo

https://invidious.nerdvpn.de/watch?v=osxr7xSxsGo

Is it weird to be pro free market but to be against this kind of pricing?

I can’t seem to square the positions.

Free market depends on relatively equal knowledge. If there is significant knowledge disparity it's no longer free.

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.

Depends on what you mean by "free market". If you think "free market" means market participants should just be free to do whatever they want then yeah, it's weird. But if you think "free market" means that products and prices should be determined by supply/demand and a competitive race to the bottom between market participants, then it's not weird at all.

I mean if you're a laissez-faire capitalist, you can't have it both ways.

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.

All 50 states should do this. It's violently anti-consumer to price in this manner.

Nobody is actually doing this. It's mainly conspiracy theories. The real reasons for the e-ink tags that spook so many people is to save labor so they don't have to pay people to affix 40,000 little stickers to shelves every week.

Just going to Aldi and shopping for yourself insulates you from this nonsense, no?

ETA: Aldi here is representing any store without a loyalty program

Not necessarily. The easy way to implement this in-person would be to give customer-specific coupons. You could get an email that says "use your loyalty card at checkout and get $2 off eggs". Then you just give everyone a different discount and only the privacy-minded folks end up paying the (inflated) sticker price.

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.

>Then you just give everyone a different discount and only the privacy-minded folks end up paying the (inflated) sticker price.

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.

"The easy way to implement this in-person would be to give customer-specific coupons. You could get an email that says "use your loyalty card at checkout and get $2 off eggs"."

This already happens. We've been getting personalized coupons from our local store for 15+ years now.

FYI, I specifically mentioned Aldi because they don't have loyalty cards. I understand that might not have been clear to everyone, so I'll edit my comment to make it clear.

Ah, yeah I don't have an Aldi near me so I didn't know that. Regardless, the same approach could be applied via emailing coupons with barcodes to scan at the register. It'd just be less convenient for the customer than having it automatically applied via a loyalty card.

The store we usually shop puts out weekly loyalty coupons via email. Sometimes it's a free pint of ice cream. Other times it might be $5 off $20 of spend, etc. To my knowledge they aren't targeting these specials to specific groups because the cashiers always mention them before we even see them appear. It's possible their screen is giving them additional info that isn't mirrored to the screen we see though.

i really doubt the downsides of adding that layer of complexity can compete with the upsides of surveillance pricing.

My mainstream supermarket in Nordics has for the longest time given individual coupons in their loyalty program.

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.

Sometimes, you may not have an Aldi near you. Also, many people may not have the luxury of going to grocery stores because they have to work in an office for 8–9 hours.

If stores raise their prices and cite this law as the reason why, that will fit with Maryland's overall theme as an eccessively exepensive state to live in.

Is it excessive? Expensive, certainly, but if I wanted cheap I'd go live in shack in the mountains.

That's called cartel pricing and its illegal.

Imagine if the state government tracked grocery transactions and adjusted taxes on each transaction to maximize total revenue from each store.

Businesses would freak out at the data collection and financial manipulation.

Do stores need minute by minute pricing? Could they just update prices at the end of the day?

Dude, this "surveillance pricing" is fucking bullshit. Good on them.

Hope you renewed your Prime membership because they're the worst offender.

Do different Prime members get different prices?

https://dailydot.com/amazon-charging-more-prime-members

It appears so, yes. And prime pays more per item.

Not defending the legitimately douchey things amazon does, but it explains it right in that article :

>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.

dirtbag egalitarianism wins again

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