alt Hacker NewsMaryland to ban A.I.-driven price increases in grocery stores
Comments
Deeply divisive political topics driving a wedge between Americans - midterms must be coming up.
If in the next 6 months you find yourself inexpliciavly angry at other working class Americans and being convinced that the solution to your problem is to take a stand on a black and white issue you just learned about in the last 10 minutes - congratulations, Americas bipartisan politcal virus has infected you!
The cure is to go into hiding until November.
Massachusetts has had fair pricing laws for grocery stores for years that I suspect already de-facto ban "dynamic pricing". It requires grocery stores to ring up the item at the lowest marked or advertised price, or the item is free. It also requires all items to be marked (or have scanners available to show the price), so they can't get around it by just not showing prices.
> The practice — supported by artificial intelligence and known as dynamic pricing or surveillance pricing — can lead to two consumers paying different amounts for the same item from the same retailer, at roughly the same time.
Is an if-statement considered AI?
So membership discounts should be banned?
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.
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.
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.
Wait, isn't this prohibited already? Some of it may be a gray zone, but a good portion of it is already downright illegal in many countries, and the rest is extremely unethical.
Doesn't this then open a market for "vpn style" apps that make everyone look broke? Get the lowest prices (ie market/baseline) on every interaction from food delivery to airplane tickets?
I'd like to see fair pricing for airlines tickets too.
What about just setting the stores in high income areas to have higher prices?
This doesn't look like a cure for cancer like I was promised.
Why share locked articles? Why would you do such a thing?
Yesterday in Lidl I was a bit shocked seeing the coupons offered by their app. They did a really good job with their mixture of stuff I had bought or might buy.
Isn't the Free Market already a form of AI that does exactly that? How can you ban tools for measuring the value of things?
Why just grocery stores? Why not ban selling or purchasing our information to and from data brokers. Like for all uses.
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.
> Merchants face fines of $10,000 for running afoul of the law, and penalties of $25,000 for repeat offenses.
Another limp-wristed penalty. Why not something like "$1,000 per dollar that you received as payment for prices in violation"? Customer buys a $5 can of beans that was AI-priced, you owe $5,000. They buy another can, you owe another $5,000. You have it set for the whole store, wham, you now owe 1,000 times your gross revenue for that day. Better damn well not do it.
Good! Surveillance pricing needs to be regulated, it distorts supply and demand massively because one party (pricing service providers, big chain stores) has a MASSIVE information advantage other the others (end customers and small shop owners). It's going to finalize the transition from a free market to a oligopoly in the retail sector. It's basically socialism for a few powerful corporations.
This seems sort of meaningless since supply/demand is the ultimate ai. Does this effectively mandate price controls? If so thank fucking GOD
[flagged]
Another attempt to repeal the Law of Supply and Demand.
Isn't this level of price discrimination in a round about way just a worse form of communism? If the algo decides you can pay X% of your worth for an item, and X% of my worth for the same item even though the absolute dollar amounts are different, isn't that strange?
https://archive.is/2026.05.01-224445/https://www.nytimes.com...