Seattle votes to ban grocery 'surveillance pricing'. Your data shouldn't set your food bill.

Seattle's City Council voted 7-2 on September 22 to prohibit certain grocery pricing practices that use personal information to decide what customers pay. Consumer Reports supported the measure and helped the mayor's office develop it.

The concept of "surveillance pricing" is straightforward. A company finds out about you, uses that information in a price-setting system, and adjusts the prices you see. In January 2025, the Federal Trade Commission revealed the existence of methods capable of accessing information from browsing history, exact location, and even the way the user’s mouse moves or items in the user's online cart.

Shopping surveillance isn't new.

Imagine doing some last-minute dinner shopping while a system tries to estimate how much extra you'll tolerate paying because it's close to dinner time. Or the system estimating your income and deciding that you can afford to pay more for groceries. The concern is that grocery stores would follow the "surge pricing" trend established by ride-sharing apps like Uber, where your cost to get around town is completely unpredictable, based on the time of day, driver availability, traffic, and other factors.

Same groceries, different prices

According to an investigation conducted by Consumer Reports, Groundwork Collaborative, and More Perfect Union in December 2025, it was determined that consumers ordering through the app Instacart encounter different prices for the same item from the same store. Nearly three out of every four products observed had different prices, with the biggest price discrepancy being around 23%.

In one Seattle Safeway test, the same basket ranged from $114.34 to $123.93. That's a $9.59 difference for the same food. The volunteers recorded prices without buying the groceries.

The researchers estimated that the average price variations could translate into an annual swing of about $1,200 for a household of four, using Instacart's grocery spending estimate. Note that estimate is extrapolated from the observed price variations; the researchers didn't follow families for a year and document $1,200 in additional spending.

Instacart said it randomly assigned customers to pricing tests and didn't use personal or demographic data for those experiments. The researchers' published methodology found no statistically meaningful relationship between the shopper characteristics they examined and the prices offered.

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On December 22, 2025, Instacart announced that it was ending all item price tests on its platform. It maintained that the tests hadn't used personal data or individual shopping behavior. The company said it would continue offering promotions and discounts.

Your loyalty card has a file on you

Shopping surveillance isn't new. Grocery chains have long offered loyalty cards to customers, which exchange discounts for detailed shopper profiles. In a May 2025 investigation of Kroger's shopper data, Consumer Reports obtained a 62-page profile for Oregon customer Hazem Salem after he requested his information under state privacy law. The file incorrectly identified his gender and underestimated his income. It also got his household size and education wrong.

Despite all the surveillance, Kroger couldn't get the basics right.

Kroger told Consumer Reports that it didn't personalize underlying product prices. It did personalize discounts, primarily using customers' prior purchases and interactions with the company. Kroger also acknowledged that demographic or online behavioral data could help filter the audiences for those offers.

Seattle's rules deserve scrutiny, too

The bill approved by the council, C.B. 121267, covers large grocery businesses, qualifying stores that sell groceries alongside other merchandise, and qualifying delivery services. It also includes random price variations in its definition of prohibited pricing discrimination. Its main pricing provisions are scheduled to take effect September 1, 2027.

The bill preserves discounts available to all members of a retailer's Seattle loyalty program. It also allows certain discounts for groups based on prior purchases, provided they don't rely on individualized prices, inferences about consumers, or additional personal data. Qualifying senior and military discounts remain permissible.

That doesn't settle the question of what retailers will actually offer.

Councilmember Maritza Rivera, who voted against the measure, warned that its scope could jeopardize loyalty programs and make groceries more expensive. A policy sold as consumer protection ought to face scrutiny if it leaves shoppers with fewer useful discounts.

The bill requests annual reporting on grocery prices, comparisons with neighboring cities, and the availability of loyalty programs.

I want businesses competing for my grocery money. Offer a better price. Explain the terms of a discount so I can decide whether it's worth signing up, but if the deal requires a secret assessment of my income or browsing habits, you've lost me. Feeding a family shouldn't require agreeing to be profiled.

What do you think? Is Seattle taking a sensible pro-consumer measure, or is it another example of government overreach?