Democrats Propose Ban On Surveillance Pricing In Grocery Stores

Democrats are putting the squeeze on President Donald Trump’s big “affordability” push by proposing a union-backed ban on surveillance pricing in grocery stores.

Sens. Ben Ray Luján (D-N.M.) and Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) introduced a bill Thursday that would forbid the controversial practice in which retailers use customers’ personal data to adjust their prices. The legislation would also restrict supermarkets from using electronic shelf labels, which allow retailers to quickly and remotely change their prices.

The Senate proposal is modeled on a House bill put forth last year by Rep. Rashida Tlaib (Mich.), who reintroduced the legislation Thursday with Rep. Val Hoyle (Ore.).

Tlaib told HuffPost she’s worried about how powerful corporations could use personal data to implement individualized price hikes, especially at a time when consumers already feel pinched by inflation.

“All of the big stores are looking into using private information about what we’re scrolling, what we’re looking at, what apps do we have, how far we live, what job we have, what color skin, you know — just all these little, like, private profile data to calculate pricing,” Tlaib said.

She added, “This is something we’ve got to push back against. It’s price gouging. It’s corporate greed using AI technology to increase prices.”

The legislation includes a couple of carveouts. Supermarkets could still use personal data to provide student or senior discounts, and smaller stores under 10,000 square feet would not be held to the ban on electronic shelf labels.

The surveillance pricing that relies on personal data is more extreme than what’s known as algorithmic pricing, in which companies quickly alter prices based on localized supply and demand. Even the latter practice could be made more difficult by a ban on electronic shelf labels, since grocery stores would need to swap out paper price tags.

An analysis last year by the nonprofits Consumer Reports and More Perfect Union and the progressive policy group Groundwork Collaborative found that prices for Instacart shoppers varied by as much as 23% for the same product at the same exact time in different stores.

“Instacart’s algorithmic pricing experiments were found to be occurring through the platform at several of the nation’s biggest grocery retailers, including Albertsons, Costco, Kroger, Safeway, Sprouts Farmers Market, and Target,” Consumer Reports wrote in its investigation.

The Democratic legislation is a priority for the United Food and Commercial Workers union, which represents hundreds of thousands of grocery store employees across the country.

The union has been pushing for similar bans in several states, worried advancements in artificial intelligence could push up prices for consumers and kill union jobs in supermarkets.

“Americans are hurting under the affordability crisis, and UFCW members see the pain in their faces every time they enter the grocery stores,” the union’s president, Milton Jones, said in a statement. “Our members also feel it themselves when they shop for their families.”