alt Hacker NewsSadly, 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.
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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.
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
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Facial recognition
https://epic.org/krogers-surveillance-pricing-harms-consumer...
Is the weather forecast calling for significant snow accumulations? Increase bread prices.
That's how
A lot of grocery stores allow ordering online for pickup or delivery.
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.
> 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.