The experiments have already been run, the hardware is already on the shelf, and the algorithm may already have a number in mind for you.
By The Craig Bushon Show Media Team
You’ve probably noticed the price of groceries creeping up. What you may not have noticed is that the grocery industry is quietly changing how those prices get set, and the technology behind the change could one day decide what you, specifically, pay at the register. That may sound like science fiction, but the infrastructure is being installed right now, pricing experiments using individualized and variable pricing have already been documented in multiple investigations, and the companies involved are counting on the fact that most Americans have no idea any of this is happening.
To understand what’s really going on, you need to understand three terms that build on each other: digital price tags, dynamic pricing, and surveillance pricing.
The Screens on the Shelf
If you’ve walked a Kroger aisle lately, you may have noticed the paper price tags replaced by small digital screens. These are electronic shelf labels, or ESLs, and here is what the documented record shows. Kroger began testing them in 2018, reached roughly 500 stores by 2023, and has since accelerated the rollout to nearly all of its 21 retail divisions nationwide, including 103 of the 104 stores in its home Cincinnati region. Walmart, for its part, plans ESLs in 2,300 stores by the end of this year. An ESL means the price of any item can be changed in seconds from a central computer, across a whole store or a whole region, and that capability is what has lawmakers alarmed.
In August 2024, Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bob Casey wrote to Kroger’s CEO warning that digital price tags let large grocers “calibrate price increases to extract maximum profits,” raising prices at the very moments demand peaks. Their letter also flagged something most shoppers have never heard of: Kroger’s ESL system, developed with Microsoft and called the EDGE Shelf, was designed to accommodate cameras on the shelf displays that could use facial recognition to estimate a shopper’s age and gender and push personalized offers accordingly.
Kroger’s response belongs in the record too, because fairness demands it. The company told the senators in writing that “Kroger does not and has never engaged in surge pricing,” and insists its business model is built on lowering prices to drive volume. That denial is on the record. What is also on the record is that the hardware capable of doing exactly what the senators fear is now installed in thousands of stores, and that a denial of current practice is not a commitment about future practice.
From Surge Pricing to Surveillance Pricing
Because a digital price is just a number on a screen, it can change as often as a company wants, based on the time of day, the weather, how busy the store is, or how fast something is selling. Rideshare customers know this as surge pricing, and the concern is that groceries are next in line for the same treatment.
Surveillance pricing goes a step further. This is when a company uses data it has collected about you, your location, your purchase history, your browsing habits, your estimated income, to set a price specifically for you. The New York Attorney General’s office describes the danger in plain terms: with digital shelf labels, one customer could buy a gallon of milk at one price while the next customer pays more for the identical gallon later the same day, not because the product changed but because the customer did. Attorney General Letitia James put it more bluntly at a rally this spring: “This is not innovation, this is exploitation.”
If this sounds theoretical, the federal government has already documented the machinery behind it. In July 2024, the Federal Trade Commission ordered eight firms, including Mastercard, Accenture, McKinsey, and pricing specialists like Revionics and PROS, to hand over documents on their “surveillance pricing” products. The FTC’s initial findings, released in January 2025, showed that these middlemen can set individualized prices using everything from a shopper’s precise location and demographics down to their mouse movements on a webpage, and that they collectively serve at least 250 clients ranging from grocery chains to apparel retailers. The clients were not named. The capability was confirmed.
Caught in the Act
The question every skeptic asks is fair: has anyone actually been caught doing this? The answer is yes, repeatedly, and the most important case broke just months ago in the aisles of the grocery business itself.
In December 2025, Consumer Reports, working with Groundwork Collaborative and More Perfect Union, published the results of live tests involving 437 volunteer shoppers across four cities. The shoppers checked prices for identical grocery items, at the same stores, at the same time, through Instacart. Nearly three out of four items showed up at different prices for different shoppers, with gaps as high as 23 percent on a single item, and the researchers estimated the practice could cost a family more than $1,200 a year. In one test, a dozen eggs from the same Safeway appeared at five different prices depending on who was looking: $3.99, $4.28, $4.59, $4.69, or $4.79. A follow-up test in November found similar price fluctuation on items at Albertsons, Costco, Sprouts, and yes, Kroger, when purchased through the Instacart platform. Instacart had been selling this price-testing service to retailers since 2023. Under public pressure, the company shut the program down on December 22, 2025, and in a separate matter that same month agreed to pay $60 million in refunds to settle FTC allegations of deceptive practices.
Instacart is not an isolated case. Target agreed to pay $5 million in civil penalties after prosecutors from seven California counties alleged the retailer both overcharged customers relative to advertised prices and used geofencing technology that caused prices displayed in its mobile app to change when shoppers entered Target parking lots or stores. In one widely reported example, a television priced at $499.99 increased to $599.99 after the shopper arrived at the store, and the resulting settlement prohibits Target from using geofencing to raise prices. A Wall Street Journal analysis back in 2012 found Staples pricing by ZIP code, charging more to customers who lived farther from a competitor. A ProPublica investigation found the Princeton Review’s pricing fell hardest on ZIP codes with large Asian American populations. Orbitz showed Mac users pricier hotels after learning Apple customers spent up to 30 percent more. And in the skies, Delta has partnered with an Israeli AI firm called Fetcherr to price airfares, telling investors it aimed to have AI setting 20 percent of domestic fares. When three senators warned that this approach would push fares toward each traveler’s personal “pain point,” Delta denied using personal data in its pricing. Its AI partner then quietly scrubbed a blog post that had boasted of individualized pricing based on purchase history and customer lifetime value. Draw your own conclusions about what gets deleted and why.
We Have Been Here Before
America has confronted this exact problem once already, in the automobile business. In the 1950s, car pricing was so opaque and so easily manipulated that Congress stepped in with the Automobile Information Disclosure Act of 1958, the law that put the Monroney sticker on the window of every new car. Senator Mike Monroney’s premise was simple: a buyer cannot negotiate fairly against a seller who controls all of the pricing information. The sticker was mandatory price disclosure, enacted to protect consumers from an industry that priced each customer according to what it believed that customer would tolerate.
The decades since have shown something else worth knowing: even with the sticker on the glass, the industry evolved around it. Two customers buying the identical vehicle on the same day can still walk out with very different deals, because rate markups in financing and leasing are not standardized, and federal regulators have documented cases where those discretionary markups fell unevenly across different groups of borrowers. Market-based pricing tools, meanwhile, push retail prices higher in wealthier areas on the theory that the customer’s perceived ability to pay will absorb it, so a shopper in an affluent suburb can be asked to pay more for the same vehicle for no reason other than where they are shopping. That is surveillance pricing by geography and demographics, and it has operated for decades inside an industry that already has a federal disclosure law.
The lesson for the grocery aisle is sobering on both ends. It proves that Congress has recognized before that individualized, information-controlled pricing is a consumer protection problem worth legislating against, which means the current state laws are not radical but a return to an old American principle. And it proves that disclosure alone does not end the practice; it simply pushes the practice toward whatever corner the disclosure does not reach. New York’s new requirement that algorithm-set prices be labeled is, in effect, a digital Monroney sticker. If the automobile business is any guide, the label is only the beginning of the fight, not the end of it.
The Fight Has Already Started
Lawmakers in both parties have noticed. New York enacted the nation’s first disclosure law requiring any retailer using your personal data to set your price to label it plainly: “THIS PRICE WAS SET BY AN ALGORITHM USING YOUR PERSONAL DATA.” The retail industry’s largest trade group sued to block the law on First Amendment grounds, and in October 2025 a federal judge threw the challenge out. Since then, Maryland signed the nation’s first outright ban on surveillance pricing in April 2026, Connecticut followed in May, and New York’s legislature has passed a One Fair Price Act now sitting on Governor Hochul’s desk, part of a package that would also ban electronic shelf labels in grocery stores and pharmacies entirely. Two dozen states have introduced more than 40 bills. On the Republican side, House Oversight Chairman James Comer opened his own investigation in March, demanding documents from Booking Holdings, Expedia, Uber, Lyft, and Instacart about AI-driven pricing.
Americans have grown accustomed to the idea that inflation means everyone pays more. Surveillance pricing represents something fundamentally different. It is the possibility that inflation becomes individualized — that two families standing side by side, buying the same groceries at the same time, could ultimately pay different prices because an algorithm predicts one family is more likely to absorb the increase. That changes not only pricing, but the traditional expectation that identical goods carry identical prices.
Reading Between the Lines
Here is the bottom line, sorted the way honest journalism should sort it. The documented facts are that the hardware capable of rapid centralized price changes has now been installed in nearly every Kroger division, that a shadow industry of pricing intermediaries serving 250-plus retail clients has been confirmed by the FTC, and that Instacart, Target, Staples, and others have been caught charging different Americans different prices for identical products. What remains contested is whether Kroger uses or intends to use its shelf labels for individualized pricing, which the company flatly denies. And the reasonable inference, stated as such, is that no corporation spends years installing region-wide dynamic pricing infrastructure with no intention of ever using its full capability, and that the only reliable guardrail between that capability and your grocery bill is whether the public is paying attention.
The companies are betting you won’t read the fine print on the shelf. Read between the lines, and get to the bottom line.
Disclaimer: This piece is opinion commentary from The Craig Bushon Show. The factual claims herein are drawn from public records and published sources, including letters from United States Senators, Federal Trade Commission filings and staff findings, federal court records, state legislative records, and the December 2025 investigation by Consumer Reports, Groundwork Collaborative, and More Perfect Union. Where a company has denied an allegation, that denial is reported alongside it: Kroger has stated in writing that it does not and has never engaged in surge pricing, and Delta Air Lines has denied using personal data to set individualized fares. Characterizations of what installed technology could enable in the future are the author’s analysis and opinion, stated as such, and should not be read as an assertion that any named company is currently engaged in individualized pricing except where documented investigations found it. Any company named in this piece is welcome to respond, and The Craig Bushon Show will publish substantive corrections if any factual claim is shown to be in error.
