Imagine a grocery store that surreptitiously changes its prices based on the weather, on your biometric data or even your ability to pay, charging wildly different prices for different customers, depending on who they are and when they choose to shop.
Plenty of lawmakers have imagined just that, so they’re trying to outlaw it before it becomes reality.
But at least one broadly-written bill would go even further by eliminating personalized coupons and deals, preventing brands and retailers from rewarding your loyalty with special offers available just for you.
Those types of deals have become more common and more popular in recent years. You might find digital coupons in your grocery loyalty account based on purchases you’ve made in the past. Programs like Albertsons stores’ “for U” offer personalized prices on particular items based on your purchase history, so you can get a discount on items you frequently buy, or that the store thinks you might like to try. There are even old-school paper Catalina coupons, which are triggered to print at the checkout based on purchases you’ve made.
But none of those discounts will be allowed in Michigan anymore, if one lawmaker has his way.
Democratic State Representative Jason Morgan has introduced what he’s calling the “Grocery Price Gouging Prevention Act,” which would prohibit grocery stores from “using dynamic or surge pricing systems to raise prices based on demand, time or personal information.”
The goal of the bill is similar to others under consideration in several other states and the U.S. Congress. But most of them are carefully phrased, to outlaw dynamic pricing based on personal characteristics like your gender, age or income level – which retailers insist isn’t happening anyway.
Morgan’s bill goes further. It states that any price changes must be “applied uniformly to all customers.” Coupons and loyalty program discounts, in particular, must be “uniformly available” and “offered on the same terms to every customer,” and must not be based on “customer attributes” such as “purchase history.”
Personalized coupons and deals are, by definition, based on your purchase history. So under Morgan’s bill, they’d be illegal.
His effort is the latest to target what opponents call “surveillance pricing.” That’s typically more suited for online shopping, where your location, demographics and search history can be used to set the price you’re charged, and you’ll never know what prices other shoppers are seeing. That’s far less likely to happen in the grocery store, where a price tag on the shelf is clearly visible to everyone and is unlikely to change based on who’s looking at it, without everyone else noticing, too.
But the advent of easily-changed digital price tags got many lawmakers worried, and racing to introduce legislation. “When you’re buying groceries, you should pay the same price as the person next to you, not whatever some tech algorithm decides you can afford,” Morgan said in a statement when introducing his bill last week. “Working families are already stretched thin. The last thing they need is a corporate computer jacking up grocery prices while they shop.”
Most other bills have exceptions, though, that Michigan’s does not. Pennsylvania’s version exempts discounts – including personalized deals – offered through a loyalty program. Massachusetts’ version applies only to the use of biometric data, and not your purchase history. And a bill introduced in Congress would allow personalized pricing as long as you opt in.
If Morgan’s bill were to become law as is, it wouldn’t be the first time a poorly-phrased measure with good intentions went on the books, resulting in a host of unintended consequences. Some grocers are still trying to figure out how to comply with a new San Diego law that bans digital-only discounts, but is phrased in such a way that it could be read as applying to all digital coupons. Morgan’s bill may be aiming to stop surveillance pricing in the grocery store, but it could end up banning personalized deals that retailers, brands and shoppers have actually come to like.
“Everyday people deserve a fair deal – not a digital scam,” Morgan said. It will be up to his legislative colleagues to decide which of those descriptors apply to personalized grocery deals. And that could ultimately determine whether personalized prices are “for U” – or for no one.
Image source: Walmart
