Maryland to ban A.I.-driven price increases in grocery stores • Hacker News Board

Re: Maryland to ban A.I.-driven price increases in grocery stores

#81

Post by clintonb » Sun, May 03, 2026, 8:08 AM UTC

NiloCK wrote: post #38

clintonb wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is possible in retail, or will soon be. Canada's major grocery chain has migrated entirely to LCD price tagging that can receive OTA updates. There are now no paper price labels in the store. The same chains have extensive camera coverage on the entrance / exits of the store. So pricing can be an optimization function as fine grained as persons currently in the store . Cameras on the aisles as well can enforce t…

The electronic shel labels use e-ink. Their refresh time is around 30 seconds. What happens if two shoppers are looking at the same product?

Re: Maryland to ban A.I.-driven price increases in grocery stores

#82

Post by Paradigma11 » Sun, May 03, 2026, 8:09 AM UTC

NiloCK wrote: post #38

clintonb wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is possible in retail, or will soon be. Canada's major grocery chain has migrated entirely to LCD price tagging that can receive OTA updates. There are now no paper price labels in the store. The same chains have extensive camera coverage on the entrance / exits of the store. So pricing can be an optimization function as fine grained as persons currently in the store . Cameras on the aisles as well can enforce t…

Since you get a location and time stamped receipt these shenanigans would be completely trivial to detect.

Re: Maryland to ban A.I.-driven price increases in grocery stores

#83

Post by 0x3f » Sun, May 03, 2026, 8:09 AM UTC

antiframe wrote: post #50

danielmarkbruce wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to mention seniors discounts, active military, and all kinds of things.

Yes, but those are per category not per consumer , which is a meaningful difference here and one you can't just ignore. Imagine a price label with a small camera that sends your facial image to a classifier of moods. Hungry? Pay 15% more. As you remove the item from the shelf, the tag reads the GUID from the item and records the price in the stores DB. Then, when you checkout, you pay that price. Someone else comes i…

Just seems like a difference of degree. You have n price tiers in both situations. Traditionally, the complexity of n_prices = n_customers (or even n_prices = n_customer_contexts) was too painful to be worth it. But they were always approximating this up until now. 'Categories' are just wider buckets over individualized prices.

Re: Maryland to ban A.I.-driven price increases in grocery stores

#84

Post by 0x3f » Sun, May 03, 2026, 8:14 AM UTC

emsign wrote: post #72

dlcarrier wrote: post #53

Grocery stores have smaller margins and more options compared to pretty much any industry, yet politicians seem to think they are the cause of all of our ills.

No, grocery stores will be the weakest entry point to have the customer get used to get individual pricing. It's not the store owners themselves but big data businesses who do the pricing for them. Essentially taking the freedom away from the shops even further while at the same time squeezing even more money out of customers. This totally distorts supply and demand.

There is no way Walmart or Target or whoever is giving up their gold dust to some nameless SaaS for pricing. They will do it in-house. Never mind the fact that a similar aggregation attempt for the property rental market was considered actionable by the DoJ already.

Re: Maryland to ban A.I.-driven price increases in grocery stores

#85

Post by 0x3f » Sun, May 03, 2026, 8:17 AM UTC

alex43578 wrote: post #54

dlcarrier wrote: post #53

Grocery stores have smaller margins and more options compared to pretty much any industry, yet politicians seem to think they are the cause of all of our ills.

It’s just pandering to voters who don’t know better. See: price of eggs in the last election.

Rent control is the canonical populist price control. That one's evergreen. Egg-prices-by-fiat are just a fad!

Re: Maryland to ban A.I.-driven price increases in grocery stores

#86

Post by 0x3f » Sun, May 03, 2026, 8:18 AM UTC

HeartStrings wrote: post #49

Why share locked articles? Why would you do such a thing?

I think people are often just logged in for years and forget they're reading a paid resource.

Re: Maryland to ban A.I.-driven price increases in grocery stores

#87

Post by mschuster91 » Sun, May 03, 2026, 8:20 AM UTC

clintonb wrote: post #80

cogman10 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is something Lyft and Uber do, but it's not really possible in retail. It is possible for retail. For example, you can simply not display the price. You can display a price range. You can use EInk displays which auto-update based on who's approaching the item. And of course it's infinitely possible in an online store. One example of how this is being employed is McDonalds trying to push everyone to use the app…

Your plan fails in a few ways. Refreshing the content on an electronic shelf label (ESL) takes about 30 seconds, and multiple people can view a product simultaneously. Unless the store is giving everyone AR glasses, people will notice the price discrepancy. This assumes you have sufficient data to actually recognize a shopper such as facial ID or some form of iBeacon for every single product for which you wish to imp…

> Using in-app discounts is the most likely way to implement this, which I am okay with. Shoppers are willingly trading their data privacy for a discount.

I'm not OK with this. Simple reason, it leaves the wide masses with no other option than to sell their data to survive.

Re: Maryland to ban A.I.-driven price increases in grocery stores

#88

Post by bit1993 » Sun, May 03, 2026, 8:20 AM UTC

This is like responding to symptoms and not addressing the root cause. This is something that should be fixed by supply and demand, buyers should have a choice where to buy and sellers should have a choice how to price their products.

These problems arise when dealing with a monopoly, that undermines the free market and that's a far worse systemic problem and the root cause of these issues. AI has nothing to do with it.

Re: Maryland to ban A.I.-driven price increases in grocery stores

#89

Post by motbus3 » Sun, May 03, 2026, 8:20 AM UTC

vjvjvjvjghv wrote: post #3

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.

And also to eliminate all competition who doesn't have enough money to compete

Re: Maryland to ban A.I.-driven price increases in grocery stores

#90

Post by motbus3 » Sun, May 03, 2026, 8:21 AM UTC

amazingamazing wrote: post #9

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.

They charge more for everyone there. Now they are able to charge more for you