The quest to wring every last penny out of the customer continues.
Seattle’s City Council voted 7-2 on September 22 to prohibit certain grocery pricing practices that use personal information to decide what customers pay. Consumer Reports supported the measure and helped the mayor’s office develop it.
The concept of “surveillance pricing” is straightforward. A company finds out about you, uses that information in a price-setting system, and adjusts the prices you see. In January 2025, the Federal Trade Commission revealed the existence of methods capable of accessing information from browsing history, exact location, and even the way the user’s mouse moves or items in the user’s online cart.
Shopping surveillance isn’t new.
Imagine doing some last-minute dinner shopping while a system tries to estimate how much extra you’ll tolerate paying because it’s close to dinner time. Or the system estimating your income and deciding that you can afford to pay more for groceries. The concern is that grocery stores would follow the “surge pricing” trend established by ride-sharing apps like Uber, where your cost to get around town is completely unpredictable, based on the time of day, driver availability, traffic, and other factors.
Same groceries, different prices
According to an investigation conducted by Consumer Reports, Groundwork Collaborative, and More Perfect Union in December 2025, it was determined that consumers ordering through the app Instacart encounter different prices for the same item from the same store. Nearly three out of every four products observed had different prices, with the biggest price discrepancy being around 23%.