Would That This Were True

Over at Gizmodo, they have an article titled, "Dems Want to Ban Surveillance Pricing at Big Grocery Stores," which discusses a bill submitted by Senators Ben Ray Luján (D-NM) and Jeff Merkley (D-OR) to ban personalized digital price gouging by grocery stores.

Call me a cynic, but I think that this is more about extorting campaign donations to water down or kill the proposal than anything else.

Sen. Ben Ray Luján, a Democrat from New Mexico, and Sen. Jeff Merkley, a Democrat from Oregon, introduced legislation Thursday that would ban so-called surveillance and surge pricing in grocery stores. Officially known as the Stop Price Gouging in Grocery Stores Act of 2026, the Senate legislation is modeled on a 2025 bill in the House.

The new bill would require stores to disclose their use of facial recognition technology and would ban electronic shelf labels (ESL) in large grocery stores. ESLs are controversial because they allow retailers to change the price of a given item remotely, opening up the possibility that they could be tied to algorithms which raise and lower prices based on conditions in the store or who’s trying to buy something. 

Hypothetically, stores can charge different prices at different times of day or rely on different inputs, right down to personalizing the price based on an individual who was looking at a given item, spotted with facial recognition tech. The concern is that factors like race, gender, and income level could be used to determine how much people are charged. A 2025 study found that Instacart was charging customers different prices for the same products, sometimes as much as 23% more. A few weeks after the study received negative press coverage, Instacart announced it was pulling the plug on its AI-powered pricing.

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The Biden administration launched an investigation into surveillance pricing in 2024 with FTC chair Lina Khan initiating a study on the ways it may harm U.S. consumers. But after President Donald Trump took power in 2025, his administration killed the study. 

I am not suggesting that either Senator Luján or Merkley are doing this solely to extract campaign donations from large retailers.  For all I know, they are completely sincere about this.

What I am suggesting is that the Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) is planning to use this proposal as a way to extort campaign donations from the industry., and once they get their vigorish, they will kill or emasculate the legislation.