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Maryland Becomes First US State to Ban Surveillance Pricing for Groceries
(www.commondreams.org)
this post was submitted on 30 Apr 2026
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Why only for groceries?
In the interest of keeping markets fair, it should be illegal across the board to change prices depending on who the customer is*. The price is the price, as it should be in a free and fair market.
*Though I think I'd still allow for rewards/loyalty card programs and coupons given to frequent customers and that sort of thing -- with the distinction being it's something that the customer explicitly opts in to. And a restriction that these programs can only ever lower prices, never raise them.
Don't let perfection be the enemy of good. Keep pushing for better consumer protections.
I actually would like to prevent loyalty card programs from lowering your price. Just call it a sale.
They want to harvest your data and sell it. And you know as sure fuck they aren't going to shit to protect it.
Well, yes. But they're doing this anyway. If you're paying with a card (and most people do), they're using your credit card number as an identifier to track you across all the purchases you made across all their stores. These days, they may also be using facial recognition for the same purpose, to even catch the people paying with cash. Making rewards program memberships and the like illegal would barely slow down their data collection at all.
It may not slow down the data collection much, other than perhaps people using different cards at different times, but if you aren’t in a loyalty program, the only place they could market specifically to you would be at the checkout.
Unless I guess they are upfront about facial recognition and have screens in store.. which just sounds awful.
Step by step it will get there. This needs to be told to whoever got this to happen!
Step by step is the typical weak Democrat policy. They make tiny incremental changes that are so small that nobody will ever notice. The Democratic party needs to pass legislation that is not afraid of making changes because big changes are needed desperately.
I'm not talking tiny incremental steps I'm talking massive steps, and steps in general but I agree that is a weak component of current Democrat policy
Rewards programs are also a scam, in a way. The company isn’t giving shit away for free, not these big corporations who run those things. Either you’re paying for it and getting your own money back, or other customers are paying for it. All so they can get a monopoly on your wallet.
Well, you (and everyone else) are paying for it through retail markups and profit margins ... but you're going to be paying that anyway under capitalism.
What the store gets out of it is:
A) They hope their rewards program will motivate you to shop at their store, rather than going to any competitor's, since you have a rewards card for their store and hopefully not the others. So the rewards program could increase their market share a bit, at the cost of a few discounts.
B) They're using it to track you, of course. It provides more analytics for them to further optimize selling you shit, and they might also be selling the data to 3rd parties.