New York's legislature has passed the One Fair Price Act, a bill that would outright ban retailers from using customers' personal data to set individualized prices, a practice critics call "surveillance pricing." The measure now sits on Governor Kathy Hochul's desk, and she has until December 31 to sign it into law.
If Hochul signs, New York would become the third state to regulate the practice, following Maryland and Connecticut. The bill would affect major retailers including Walmart and Kroger, both of which have been expanding their use of digital shelf tags, technology that lets stores change prices in seconds rather than hours.
The core question is simple enough for any shopper to understand: Should the store you walk into be allowed to charge you a different price than the person standing next to you, based on your browsing history, your zip code, or the phone in your pocket?
The bill draws a line between two kinds of algorithmic pricing. Dynamic pricing, where costs shift based on broad market conditions like supply, demand, and time of day, would remain legal. But surveillance pricing, where a company mines a customer's personal data to generate an individualized price, would be prohibited, as The U.S. Sun reported.
Companies that continue using dynamic pricing algorithms would face new transparency requirements. They must "clearly and conspicuously" disclose their use of dynamic pricing, how often prices may change, and what conditions factor into those changes.
That disclosure mandate goes well beyond what New York currently requires. The state's Algorithmic Pricing Disclosure Act, which took effect in November 2025, allowed surveillance pricing as long as companies posted a notice, something along the lines of "This price was set by an algorithm using your personal data." The One Fair Price Act would eliminate the practice entirely rather than simply requiring a label.
A separate bill that would have banned electronic price tags altogether passed the New York state Senate but stalled in the Assembly, which declined to vote on it. That measure targeted the hardware itself, the digital screens replacing paper tags on store shelves, rather than the pricing algorithms behind them.
Walmart has been aggressively rolling out these digital tags across its stores, a move that has drawn union resistance and a wave of state-level bans. Kroger uses them as well. Retailers have pushed back against concerns about the technology, insisting the tags exist for convenience because manually swapping paper labels takes hours.
But the convenience argument rings hollow to shoppers who understand what the technology enables. A digital tag paired with predictive pricing software means a gallon of milk could cost one price at 10 a.m. and a different price at 6 p.m., or a different price for a customer whose purchase history suggests a willingness to pay more.
Lindsay Owens, author of "Gouged: The End of a Fair Price," put it bluntly in comments reported by the New York Post:
"Surveillance pricing is the intersection of two things Americans hate: being spied on and being overcharged."
Michael Lai, CEO of SmartCustomer, described the mechanics in the same report: two shoppers can add the same item to their carts at the same time and see completely different prices, with neither aware of the discrepancy. The Post noted that Apple device users may even be charged higher prices than PC users, based on assumptions about their income level.
Grocery stores, business groups, and delivery services including Instacart lobbied against both New York bills. Their central warning: the legislation will lead to price increases for American consumers.
That argument deserves scrutiny. The claim is essentially that if retailers cannot charge some customers more based on personal data, they will raise prices for everyone. In other words, the industry position is that surveillance pricing keeps costs down, for some people, some of the time, by extracting higher prices from others. That is not a consumer-protection argument. It is an admission that the system works by picking winners and losers based on data most shoppers never consented to share.
Retailers have also cast aside concerns about electronic shelf labels, insisting they exist solely for operational efficiency. But efficiency for whom? A store that can reprice thousands of items in seconds has a tool no paper tag ever provided, the ability to respond to demand signals, competitor pricing, and individual customer profiles in real time.
The legislative pushback now spans at least seven states, and the momentum is not slowing down.
Maryland became the first state to ban surveillance pricing in grocery stores outright. Its Protection from Predatory Pricing Act, set to take effect October 1, 2026, bars retailers from using surveillance data, shopping history, ethnicity, or income to set different prices for different customers. Stores would be required to keep prices fixed for at least one full business day.
Fox News reported that Maryland Governor Moore pointed to the financial pressure already squeezing working families and argued that new technology should not become another tool for squeezing them harder. California, Colorado, Illinois, and New Jersey are all exploring or enacting similar legislation.
The pattern is clear. State after state is arriving at the same conclusion: the technology moved faster than the law, and consumers got caught in the gap.
Governor Hochul has not publicly indicated whether she intends to sign the One Fair Price Act. The December 31 deadline gives her months to weigh the competing pressures, industry lobbying on one side, consumer frustration on the other.
Several questions remain unanswered. The bill's enforcement mechanisms and penalties for violations have not been detailed in public reporting. The specific sponsors in the Senate and Assembly have not been named. And the scope of Hochul's own position on algorithmic pricing remains unclear, even after she signed the earlier, weaker disclosure law.
What is clear is that New York shoppers, like shoppers in Maryland, Connecticut, and a growing list of other states, are pushing back against a pricing model that treats their personal data as raw material for profit extraction. Walmart's ongoing store overhauls, from rapid remodels to digital tag rollouts, have made the retailer a focal point for that frustration.
New fee structures and policy changes at the state level, such as Pennsylvania's new plastic bag fee hitting Walmart shoppers, only compound the sense that the ordinary trip to the store keeps getting more complicated and more expensive.
There is a temptation on the right to reflexively oppose new regulation. Free markets work. Government meddling usually makes things worse. Those instincts are sound, when the market is actually free.
But surveillance pricing is not a free market in any meaningful sense. A free market requires informed buyers and transparent prices. When a retailer uses your purchase history, your location, and the device in your hand to quietly charge you more than the next customer, without your knowledge, that is not competition. It is manipulation dressed up as efficiency.
Conservative voters care about honest dealing. They care about being treated fairly at the checkout line. They should not have to run their groceries through a VPN to get a straight price.
The question for Hochul is whether she will sign a bill that gives New York shoppers what they already expect: one price on the shelf, the same for everyone. The question for the rest of the country is how long retailers will be allowed to pretend that charging you more because of your zip code is just good business.
When the store knows more about your wallet than you do about its prices, the market isn't free, it's rigged.