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Maryland Is First to Ban A.I.-Driven Price Increases in Grocery Stores

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/01/business/surveillance-pricing-groceries-maryland.html
46•doener•2h ago

Comments

SilverElfin•1h ago
Why just grocery stores? Why not ban selling or purchasing our information to and from data brokers. Like for all uses.
janalsncm•39m ago
Because 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.
vjvjvjvjghv•1h ago
The end goal must be to emulate US healthcare where nobody knows what things cost and you find out only months or years after buying.
WalterBright•1h ago
Another attempt to repeal the Law of Supply and Demand.
lysace•1h ago
Not 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.

CuriouslyC•1h ago
Supply curves are literally predicated on one price for a market.
Ar-Curunir•1h ago
Better that you stick to promoting D instead of defending price gouging.
fuckinpuppers•1h ago
That shit is evil
snendroid-ai•1h ago
https://archive.is/2026.05.01-224445/https://www.nytimes.com...
amazingamazing•1h ago
Why 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.
clintonb•1h ago
You'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.

amazingamazing•1h ago
The article says loyalty programs and https://mgaleg.maryland.gov/mgawebsite/Legislation/Details/H... makes no mention of this store restriction. Just retailer.

It’s unclear to me why transportation demand pricing is allowed but not delivery.

I expect the outcome of this to be prices raised for everyone and then loyalty discounts per group.

ChrisArchitect•1h ago
[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47951007
geuis•59m ago
Doesn'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?
amazingamazing•54m ago
How’s that gonna work when they know your address?
Uehreka•53m ago
That 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•25m ago
The 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•13m ago
Bingo. 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•47m ago
Isn'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?
MithrilTuxedo•4m ago
Isn't the Free Market already a form of AI that does exactly that? How can you ban tools for measuring the value of things?

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Maryland Is First to Ban A.I.-Driven Price Increases in Grocery Stores

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/01/business/surveillance-pricing-groceries-maryland.html
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