The Surveillance State Goes Grocery Shopping

The surveillance state goes grocery shopping

By Jacques Ponthier, Louisiana University MSW Student, and Louisiana Progress Graduate Student Intern

Imagine it's your grocery day. You’re pushing your shopping cart to the dairy section to get a gallon of milk and a carton of eggs for the week. You go to check out. There’s another shopper in front of you in line who you see is getting the exact same items, but the prices are lower than yours. 

You ask yourself: Why are my prices higher for the exact same things? What you didn’t realize is that your price was set specifically for you by the store or through a tech company they’ve hired to help them determine the highest possible prices they can charge each customer based on personal data. Data you thought was private.

Known as “surveillance pricing,” this kind of individual- or group-specific price-setting happens when companies obtain your personal data to set bespoke prices. Instead of there being one universal price for all customers, every shopper in the store could be paying a different, personalized price for milk, eggs, toothpaste, baby formula, over the counter drugs, and almost any other product.

Your personal price could be determined by a variety of things: your zip code, your internet search history, previous purchases, the clothes you decided to wear that day, or even the way you approached the dairy section with conviction while another person buying the same thing hesitated before putting it in their shopping cart. You are paying more not because the product is valued higher, but because an algorithm decided this is what you are likely willing to pay. This is the reality we are experiencing under surveillance pricing, and it is likely to get even more invasive in the future.

While this practice is mostly relegated to apps for grocery and department stores, or gig services like UberEats and Lyft, there are attempts to expand it into your grocery store aisles.  Target, for instance, will track your location to increase the price of televisions by $100 if you are in close vicinity to one of their stores when you are on their app. 

A scarier instance occurred at Kroger last year. The company was caught testing technology that uses AI-based facial recognition tools to collect information about shoppers while they were in stores to tailor prices specific to individual shoppers. Their software not only used people’s personal data to set prices, it analyzed how they were interacting with products to determine their willingness to purchase those items. That means they were charging people more because they knew how much each person needed or wanted each product. And they did it without disclosing the practice in any way.

Before this practice becomes completely ubiquitous, it is absolutely essential to protect consumers by regulating it. This year, Louisiana Progress is working with State Senator Royce Duplessis to reign in this practice before it gets out of hand.