Seattle, Washington, has become the first city in the U.S. to ban so-called surveillance pricing in grocery stores, making it so grocery stores can't use personal data and artificial intelligence algorithms to set different prices for individual customers.
Dubbed the "Fair Pricing" policy, the legislation bars large online and brick-and-mortar grocery retailers from using people's employment status, race, gender, browser history, social media activity or chatbot conversations to set customer prices. Moving forward, grocers will instead be required to clearly post prices that are consistent across all customers.
"Food is an essential good that’s getting more expensive all the time,” said Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson in a September 23 release. “People have been clear: they don’t want their data fed into algorithms that decide how much they pay at the grocery store."
Surveillance pricing is used across a variety of industries to determine the highest price a customer will pay for a product or service, based on their personal data and other market trends, the Electronic Privacy Information Center explains. A Federal Trade Commission study into the practice released in 2025 found that surveillance pricing could even be used to collect real-time information about a person's browsing and payment history to allow a company to offer (or not offer) promotions based on the customer's affinity for certain products.
"For example, a pharmacy could choose to exclude routine, regular customers in a special promotion for over-the-counter medications or weight-loss supplements because the pharmacy inferred that those customers are likely to buy those products anyway," the FTC's report reads.
In its Fair Pricing legislation, Seattle councilmembers alleged that Kroger grocery stores have collected "extensive consumer data," and have been using that information to "make detailed inferences about consumers, and target discounts to consumers based on those inferences." A 2025 investigation from Consumer Reports also found that online grocery delivery platform Instacart had been offering the same products at different prices depending on the customer, as part of an apparent AI-powered "algorithmic pricing experiment," spanning grocery retailers like Albertsons, Costco, Kroger, Safeway and Target.
