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Maryland to ban A.I.-driven price increases in grocery stores
- vjvjvjvjghv 6mo agoThe end goal must be to emulate US healthcare where nobody knows what things cost and you find out only months or years after buying.
- emsign 6mo agoNo, surveillance pricing is used to get the maximum out of the customer, not the opposite. This needs to be illegal. If anything surveillance pricing will make the retail business MORE like the health care system, because the latter already employs these tactics: the unhealthier you are, the more you pay. Same thing as surveillance pricing. It's a fundamental shift from: "I sell this product for the cheapest price possible and I make everything possible in my business to be cost effective and buy from more cost effective businesses." TO "I don't care about cost-effectiveness. I just try to find out how to get the most money out of my customers."
- socalgal2 6mo ago> the unhealthier you are, the more you pay. I'd re-write that as "the more you consume the more you pay". Seems normal.
- RandomLensman 6mo agoShould there be any consumer surplus?
- adrian_b 6mo agoIn most industries, especially in electronics and computers, the more you consume, the less you pay. Companies like Google or Amazon pay for a server computer only a small fraction of the price I would have to pay to buy it. Similarly for any electronics or computing device or component. The same is true for any food ingredient. I can buy some spice by the kilogram at a price an order of magnitude lower than when I buy 10 grams of it. If the same were applied in healthcare, someone with a chronic disease should pay much less for the same drug, in comparison with someone with an acute disease.
- motbus3 6mo agoAnd also to eliminate all competition who doesn't have enough money to compete
- xyzal 6mo agoRegarding US healthcare costs, I cannot understand why people are not in the streets with pitchforks. Most of Europe has this problem solved. What is the root cause w.r.t. the current situation? Are there any obvious ways out? Do any US politicians have any plans for a change? Are there any discussed proposals how to reform?
- skippyboxedhero 6mo agothe US has a bigger public healthcare system than, afaik, every European country. the reason why there aren't pitchforks is also because the US is a much richer country than Europe so people are happy to pay for more healthcare. if you are rich, the marginal value of money vs more time being alive is zero (an example is orthapedics for the elderly, the US spends a huge amount in this area relative to most European countries). it is worth considering whether could a rational person could possibly disagree with the idea that the government is best placed to decide whether extending your life is a good investment (there are European systems that are not well run which resolve this unusual ways i.e. being unable to provide basic healthcare whilst giving hundreds of millions to PR agencies, sometimes run by people who happened to work for the government...total coincidence, to run media campaigns to "prevent" ill health). it is not simple. there are largely private systems that run very well, funnily enough most of these are in Europe. there are public systems that run very badly, again many of these are in Europe. the discussion of public vs private is largely not relevant or particularly interesting (do people think that doctors just work for free in Europe? they do not, the incentives when you try to create a cheaper healthcare system by underpaying doctors, which exists in parts of Europe, creates some very bad situations i.e. an overreliance on doctors from Africa who have unknown training, Americans tend not to have imagined the scenario where healthcare is "free"/paid with taxes but they are being operated on by someone who can't speak English).
- thrance 6mo ago> the US has a bigger public healthcare system than, afaik, every European country In which metric(s)? Afaik, life expectancy is lower in the US than in most of western Europe. And Americans are known to pay much more than Europeans on healthcare, on average.
- SilverElfin 6mo agoWhy just grocery stores? Why not ban selling or purchasing our information to and from data brokers. Like for all uses.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- janalsncm 6mo agoBecause 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.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- WalterBright 6mo ago[flagged]
- lysace 6mo agoNot sure that is applicable here. 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. If a store knows, for example, that one of those customers lives in a wealthier neighborhood, it can charge that person a higher price.
- WalterBright 6mo agoThat has always happened. If you go to a flea market, do you think the seller isn't going to bump up the price if you look prosperous or desperate? Do you think the roof replacement company isn't going to make a bid based on how wealthy or poor your neighborhood looks? Or you need a new water heater? Do you think grocery stores in wealthy neighborhoods charge more? We live in a market economy. If you don't like the price, us apes have learned to say "no". BTW, if prices are set by the wealth of the customer, then the poor ought to be getting a better deal. Isn't that a good thing?
- antiframe 6mo agoAt the flea market you can haggle. Are you saying we should all have to haggle with the harried checkout person over the price of milk ever time we shop? Or everything is self checkout and you don't haggle but then choose whether you accept the price or not? As with many things in technology, it's not about the raw concept, it's about the automation of it and inability to appeal to a human. Haggling face to face is human. Having a bot decide what you are paying (take it or leave it) is asymmetric with the benefit going to the corpo.
- WalterBright 6mo agoI've never encountered or heard of a grocery store that didn't mark the prices on the shelves. > asymmetric with the benefit going to the corpo You have the power to say "no". The only transactions you are forced into are the ones dealing with the government or the mob. > inability to appeal to a human I was stonewalled by a gigantic corporation the other day over a substantial sum of money. I googled the name and address of the CEO, and sent him a hand written polite letter. My issue was promptly resolved. I know the CEO didn't read the letter. But he has staff that does, and hand writing a letter will get their attention, as well as reminding them that I was a loyal customer.
- fuckinpuppers 6mo agoThat shit is evil
- dandanua 6mo agoYes, and it's already in many places where possible, e.g. taxi, airlines, online stores and services, insurance, health, etc.
- snendroid-ai 6mo agohttps://archive.is/2026.05.01-224445/https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/01/business/surveillance-pricing-groceries-maryland.html https://archive.is/2026.05.01-224445/https://www.nytimes.com...
- amazingamazing 6mo agoWhy 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.
- motbus3 6mo agoThey charge more for everyone there. Now they are able to charge more for you
- Gigachad 6mo agoWhich supermarkets have you seen doing this? This conspiracy theory about epaper tags changing their price on you falls flat when you think about it for even a moment. The tags do not update fast enough to do that, couldn’t handle multiple people in the same area, and would be impractical to link back to the purchase time, resulting in people noticing the price scanned didn’t match what they saw on the ticket. Per customer pricing is only possible for online shopping.
- motbus3 6mo agoMaybe because it is not my first language, but I don't mean they are doing, I am saying they can do it and it is not that difficult. Pharmacies in my home country are notorious for making personalised prices. Some big brand grocery stores here have "fiddly" cards and face tracking. They can easily manipulate prices to make you register yourself and then make discount based on some personalisation metric. We are all used to it though Amzn and others. We just don't realise that all that is needed for it to get to your basket is that one of them to do it and others to follow. We have seen many recent examples of companies applying abusive corporate practices and instead of capitalising on it, the competitors just follow with some excuse...
- clintonb 6mo agoYou'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.
- ChrisArchitect 6mo ago[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47951007 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47951007
- geuis 6mo agoDoesn'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?
- Uehreka 6mo agoThat 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.
- kdheiwns 6mo agoThe problem isn't really turning them off as much as it is people having no choice. There aren't too many supermarket chains. If one chain does this, rather than other chains undercutting them on price, they're going to do the same to maximize their profits. Most people only have one or two stores near their home. Some maybe have three. That doesn't leave a lot of options. And if you or your family is hungry, you won't drive around for hours, burning gas, until you find a shop that saves you a few bucks. Most people will have no choice but to give in, then the practice is implemented everywhere and the price treadmill accelerates.
- xp84 6mo agoBingo. Exactly. In every one of these oligopolies, the most customer-hostile behaviors spread quickly and completely, and any customer-friendly ideas anyone sneaks in fizzle out quickly. Great example: 15 years ago, assuming you were out of contract, cancelling a postpaid cell phone line worked very differently. Important to know: it was and still is “billed in advance,” meaning you pay around say, January 4, for your service from Jan 4 through Feb 3rd. So if you cancelled your service around Jan 19th, you’d be owed a refund of a half month’s service. 15 years ago, you’d receive a check or a credit to your method of payment - since you didn’t get the service you paid for, that seemed very obviously correct. Sometime at least 10 years ago, one of the cell phone carriers decided to try just saying that you never got a refund, and that if you didn’t want to be ripped off, then you should just cancel on the one day of the month where you had finished using the service you paid for (and hope you didn’t do it too late and get billed for another month). Initially it was just that one carrier who did this, but quickly this became the norm across the whole industry, and now all three postpaid carriers work exactly that way. This is of course the same story with more well-publicized enshittification, like Basic Economy plane tickets, data caps on your broadband service, etc. etc.
- morkalork 6mo agoIsn'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?
- thunderstruck 6mo agoI'd like to see fair pricing for airlines tickets too.
- bdangubic 6mo agouse a VPN, like Bulgaria is usually good. everything is on sale if you are Bulgarian (most of the time). you may have to text back Yes your credit card company when you get a fraud alert text - that’s about the only inconvenience. just bought US-EU return ticket for June - 22% lower than lowest price I’ve seen “from US” in the last month
- Nykon 6mo agoI have residence in Bulgaria and I do not necessarily agree with that statement. Glad it works for you though
- protimewaster 6mo agoI assume this doesn't work with every airline / in every case? E.g., if I am booking with a US-based airline like United or American, to fly between two US cities, do they really bother to offer cheaper tickets based on your international location?
- bdangubic 6mo agoIn my experience tickets are always cheaper on the VPN, Bulgaria, The Balkans… I just bought airline tickets that were much cheaper and I also do other bookings this way as well, I got a hotel in Philly a month ago 18% cheaper. it is not bullet-proof thing and I am not traveling all the time but I don’t recall a time I did not find at least a little bit better deal
- MithrilTuxedo 6mo agoIsn't the Free Market already a form of AI that does exactly that? How can you ban tools for measuring the value of things?
- njovin 6mo agoThe ban is specifically on adjusting prices _per-consumer_ based on data known/collected/stolen/assumed about the consumer.
- testing22321 6mo agoWhich is wild, because things like car dealerships, airline tickets and many more do it already.
- danielmarkbruce 6mo agoNot to mention seniors discounts, active military, and all kinds of things.
- antiframe 6mo agoYes, but those are per category not per consumer, which is a meaningful difference here and one you can't just ignore. Imagine a price label with a small camera that sends your facial image to a classifier of moods. Hungry? Pay 15% more. As you remove the item from the shelf, the tag reads the GUID from the item and records the price in the stores DB. Then, when you checkout, you pay that price. Someone else comes in get one price, balks, walks away. Comes back and ponders a while. They only get 5% above the base. Someone runs up and grabs and item without really looking at the tag, they pay 50% more. Now imagine that it gets it wrong half the time.
- 0x3f 6mo agoJust seems like a difference of degree. You have n price tiers in both situations. Traditionally, the complexity of n_prices = n_customers (or even n_prices = n_customer_contexts) was too painful to be worth it. But they were always approximating this up until now. 'Categories' are just wider buckets over individualized prices.
- HeartStrings 6mo agoWhy share locked articles? Why would you do such a thing?
- 0x3f 6mo agoI think people are often just logged in for years and forget they're reading a paid resource.
- dlcarrier 6mo agoGrocery 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.
- alex43578 6mo agoIt’s just pandering to voters who don’t know better. See: price of eggs in the last election.
- 0x3f 6mo agoRent control is the canonical populist price control. That one's evergreen. Egg-prices-by-fiat are just a fad!
- alex43578 6mo agoWith both parties scrambling to buy non-taxpayer votes with taxpayer money, the list is endless. Free healthcare, free tuition, pork barrel spending, wars on behalf of other nations, lavish benefits for your ethnic group’s immigrants, etc.
- cbdevidal 6mo agoWhat could possibly go wrong?
- lkey 6mo ago[flagged]
- subjectsigma 6mo ago[flagged]
- estearum 6mo agoI mean it's very likely the MAGAcult literally just writes checks to people with Dear Leader's face/signature on them going into the midterms. That seems bad.
- odie5533 6mo agoThis doesn't look like a cure for cancer like I was promised.
- emsign 6mo agoGood! 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.
- BrenBarn 6mo ago> 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.
- bit1993 6mo agoThis 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.
- cowanon77 6mo agoThere 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.
- bit1993 6mo agoWhen the government actively decides the price of goods and services, it becomes more and more like communism. The government should instead uphold the free market and proactively prevent collusion and monopolies that threaten the free market, this is harder to do in the US because of lobbying though.
- intended 6mo agoSlogans and bromides are good starting points but not solutions. The government IS preventing coordinated price setting by closing the loophole of third party data brokers.
- Dylan16807 6mo ago> When the government actively decides the price of goods and services Ok. Can we get to what this kind of law is actually doing? The simplest version would be roughly "stores need to display prices and only change them once per day". No specific prices are being imposed.
- ibrahimhossain 6mo ago[flagged]
- heisenbit 6mo agoYesterday 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.
- Iulioh 6mo agoNote for people who don't know: They profile you and offer discounts based on your past purchases
- josefrichter 6mo agoWait, 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.
- olsondv 6mo agoIt’s likely just posturing for political support. No nation-wide law that I’m aware of exists in the US. In my state, the lowest advertised or displayed price is the honored price. They have to update the shelf price before the register’s. Any difference gets a refund which unfortunately is not automatic. Requires vigilance by the consumer but it would prevent this type of AI pricing.
- anArbitraryOne 6mo agoWhat about just setting the stores in high income areas to have higher prices?
- throwaway27448 6mo agoThis seems sort of meaningless since supply/demand is the ultimate ai. Does this effectively mandate price controls? If so thank fucking GOD
- technothrasher 6mo agoMassachusetts 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.
- PearlRiver 6mo agoIn 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).
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- paulddraper 6mo agoThe true minimum wage is zero.
- amalcon 6mo agoIt's definitely possible for a job to have negative expected value for the employee, even if looking only at cash flow. MLMs are the most obvious way, but e.g. hairdressers often need to rent their station in the store -- while this can be a reasonable deal, it can also run negative.
- itopaloglu83 6mo agoAn 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.
- hermannj314 6mo ago[flagged]
- ImPostingOnHN 6mo agoThis actually seems like a pretty uniting issue. I haven't seen many politicians of any party openly come out in favor of the sort of price discrimination banned by this bill.
- Eddy_Viscosity2 6mo agoCame to say the same thing. Though calling it 'price discrimination' will bring out the MAGAs who will reflexively conclude that banning it must be woke/DEI and then demand to have it everywhere. Better to call it 'diverse pricing' to get the opposite reaction.
- jasonlotito 6mo ago"diverse pricing" comes across as DEI pricing, too, what with the name. And the name is what's important, not the actual idea. If you want them to be against it, call it "Socialist Pricing" or if you want them to support it call it "Freedom Pricing." I know it's not indicative of either, but it just needs to sound bad or good.
- Calazon 6mo agoI think that was the idea, that MAGAs would see "price discrimination" as a good thing, but "diverse pricing" as a bad thing.
- dfxm12 6mo agoFWIW, Trump's FTC dropped a price discrimination lawsuit against Pepsi after Pepsi donated $500k to Trump's inauguration. The suit was brought up under Biden's administration. Republican politicians do support price discrimination. It fits in with their pro big business, anti consumer policies. To recognize this and then quibble over "the sort" or how "openly" they support it, is disingenuous.
- chronc6393 6mo ago> 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?
- ImPostingOnHN 6mo agoWhat is a "membership discount" (assuming you don't mean coupons) in the context of a grocery store? Can you give an example of a major grocery store that has one? For what it's worth, > The bill clarifies that certain practices, such as promotional pricing, loyalty programs, or price differences based on objective costs like shipping, are not considered prohibited dynamic pricing.
- atestu 6mo agoHarris Teeter is an example of a large chain that has promotions (not coupons) that are applied at checkout only if you have your VIC card (their free membership program). There’s a lot of BOGO, a few dollars off etc offers that are tagged to the price label throughout the store.
- ImPostingOnHN 6mo agoGot it, thank you for the example. That seems to be still allowed by the bill. The behavior targeted here seems to be more like "Our data indicates this person is poor and desperate, let's charge them more for rice and beans than we charge other people, since that's most of what they'll buy. We've calculated that we can charge up to $X to exhaust their budget/foodstamps and they'll still buy."
- wildzzz 6mo agoI used to shop at HT at the last place I lived. It was always crazy seeing all of those discounts pop up. I don't know if I was actually saving money over the other stores nearby but it certainly felt like it. Honestly, I like shopping at Lidl now. My grocery bill always feels much cheaper. I don't get much savings using my phone number, I think they want you to clip coupons on the app but I still walk out paying less than I would elsewhere. A large portion of the stuff at Lidl are not major brands, I suspect they are the companies that produce white label products for store brands.
- ReptileMan 6mo agoThey 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.
- amelius 6mo agoCan we do the same for DRAM prices please?
- oulipo2 6mo agoAI 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
- wernsey 6mo agoSurveillance 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/ https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/30/something-must-be-done/