Dynamic Pricing Is Coming to Your Grocery Store: What Electronic Shelf Labels and "Surveillance Pricing" Mean for Your Grocery Bill
CNBC reports that Walmart plans to have digital price tags in every one of its U.S. stores by the end of 2026. Kroger has installed them in nearly one in four of its roughly 2,700 stores, and the technology is already in Whole Foods and Amazon Fresh. The global market for electronic shelf labels was an estimated $1.85 billion in 2024 and is projected to reach $7.54 billion by 2033, according to Grand View Research.
As the technology spreads, so does concern among shoppers, who raise questions like: will the price of milk change while I'm standing in the aisle, or change depending on who I am? At the Center for Responsible Food Business, we think consumers deserve to know what is happening and why now is the time for shoppers and lawmakers to weigh in, before corporations make the rules.
Three Terms, Three Different Things
Much of the confusion around this issue comes from confusion around related terms; here is what they mean and how they affect shoppers.
Electronic shelf labels (ESLs) are small digital screens that replace paper price tags and can be updated centrally or by app. On their own, they do not decide prices any more than a paper tag does.
Dynamic pricing means changing the posted price over time, by time of day, demand, or inventory, for everyone in the store at once. "Surge pricing," raising prices when demand peaks, is its most controversial form. Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bob Casey warned in a 2024 letter to Kroger that digital tags may enable grocery chains to "calibrate price increases to extract maximum profits," as CNBC reported.
Surveillance pricing, also called personalized pricing, means using an individual's personal data to set a price specific to that person. The Federal Trade Commission describes it as companies using “a consumer's online data—location, demographics, browsing history, shopping habits, or device type—to set individualized prices, often charging higher amounts based on an inferred willingness to pay."
Understanding these terms is important, because retailers may deny using one but not the others.
What Does the Evidence Show So Far?
Researchers at UC San Diego, UT Austin, and Northwestern analyzed more than 180 million price observations across 114 stores in four states and found "essentially no change in pricing behavior" after electronic labels were installed. Unexplained price spikes were rare before ESLs, affecting about 0.0042 percent of products, and increased by a small margin of 0.0006 percentage points afterwards, a change that did not suggest a statistically significant increase in surge pricing. The study is a working paper, not yet peer-reviewed, and it measured a period when adoption was still limited.
While this evidence may provide consumers reassurance for the moment, it does not neutralize concerns about how this tech will be used in the near future. As Cullen Hendrix of the Peterson Institute for International Economics put it, once the hardware is installed, "the only impediment to how quickly they can change prices at this point is how long it takes the human in the loop to decide to change the prices." The constraint today is a business decision, not a technical one.
Where Personalized Pricing Already Exists
While the shelves have remained more predictable, personalized pricing has been documented in the digital layer of grocery shopping - namely at Instacart, an app that provides grocery shopping and delivery services across grocery stores.
In December 2025, Consumer Reports, Groundwork Collaborative, and More Perfect Union found that Instacart's algorithmic price experiments showed different shoppers different prices for identical items at the same store at the same time. Differences averaged 13 percent and ran as high as 23 percent; a dozen eggs at one Washington, D.C. Safeway displayed five simultaneous price points. The groups estimated the practice could cost a family of four roughly $1,200 a year.
Instacart subsequently announced it would end the program, though it will still let retail and brand partners test promotions on customers. The FTC opened an investigation into Instacart's pricing tactics in 2025.
The data infrastructure enabling that personalization, however, is already extensive. The FTC's surveillance-pricing study found that consumer behaviors "ranging from mouse movements on a webpage" to abandoned shopping carts can be used to tailor pricing, and that the intermediary firms it examined worked with at least 250 clients, including grocery stores. A Consumer Reports investigation found Kroger builds detailed profiles on some 63 million customers, including an "income predictor" that the report showed can suffer from inaccuracies that may affect customer discounts. One shopper who requested his data under Oregon's privacy law received a 62-page profile.
History suggests that when this technology exists, companies test the waters. Amazon ran a personalized price test on DVDs in 2000 and apologized after customer outrage; Wendy's triggered a national backlash in 2024 merely by announcing plans to test "dynamic pricing." The pattern repeats: laying the groundwork, testing the boundaries, and retreating upon public outcry.
What Regulators and Legislatures Are Doing
The FTC voted 5–0 in 2024 to order eight companies to explain their surveillance-pricing products and released initial findings in January 2025. Days later, the new FTC chair withdrew the study's public comment period roughly three months early, and the final findings remain unpublished.
In May 2026, Rep. Frank Pallone opened an inquiry with letters to 25 major retailers. Reps. Josh Gottheimer and Mike Lawler introduced the bipartisan No Rigged Grocery Prices Act, which would bar grocers and delivery platforms from using personal data to charge different prices for the same items, while explicitly preserving discounts and loyalty programs. California's attorney general has also opened an investigative sweep into how retailers, grocers, and hotels use consumer data to set prices.
Individual states are moving faster. Maryland and Connecticut have enacted bans on using personal data to set individualized food prices, and New York and New Jersey have passed bills awaiting their governors' signatures. New York already requires businesses using personalized algorithmic pricing to disclose it, a law that survived a First Amendment challenge in federal district court in October 2025.
Notably, even the strictest of these laws preserve loyalty discounts, coupons, and sales. What they target is narrow: using someone's personal data to raise the price that person pays for food.
Public opinion is overwhelmingly in favor of limiting this practice as well. A poll by Groundwork Collaborative/Data for Progress found that 76 percent of voters support banning surveillance pricing, and 80 percent agree every customer should be charged the same price for the same item. A Talker Research survey found 66 percent of Americans would stop shopping with a retailer that priced them by their data.
Why Are Groceries Different?
While airline tickets and concert seats have been dynamically priced for years, food is in a class of its own. Groceries are a repeat, non-discretionary purchase and no one can opt out of eating. Price manipulation in this area raises serious concerns about fairness and food access.
All of this lands on households already strained by food inflation, an issue we examined in What's Really Behind High Grocery Prices? and in our review of documented price fixing in the food supply. Legislators appear to agree that food is a special category: Maryland scoped the nation's first surveillance-pricing ban specifically to food retailers.
The disproportionate advantage stores have over shoppers is the core concern. A grocer that holds a robust profile on a shopper, an income predictor, and an extensive purchase history knows far more about that shopper than the shopper can ever know about the pricing system. It is the same concerning power dynamic we flagged in our position on the Kroger-Albertsons merger: concentrated market power plus concentrated data is a troubling combination.
What Shoppers Can Do Now
Know the three terms. A digital shelf tag is not, by itself, a personalized price, and a "no surge pricing" pledge is not a pledge about personalization.
Compare app prices to shelf prices and screenshot discrepancies. The Instacart findings surfaced because shoppers compared identical baskets.
Read your loyalty program's terms, and where state privacy law allows, request your data profile.
Watch for disclosure labels. In New York, algorithmic personalized prices must say so; Connecticut's disclosure requirement takes effect October 1, 2026.
Weigh in. Communicate your concerns to local and state representatives who have the power to determine the future of this technology.
What CRFB Recommends
No individualized pricing for food. Congress and the states should prohibit using personal data to set person-specific grocery prices, following the Maryland–Connecticut template, while preserving ordinary discounts, coupons, and loyalty promotions.
Disclosure wherever algorithmic pricing operates. New York's upheld disclosure law shows this is workable; shoppers have a right to make informed decisions about where they shop.
Finish the federal homework. The FTC should complete and publish its surveillance-pricing study, and retailers should answer Rep. Pallone's inquiry fully and on the record.
Data minimization and audit rights. Grocers collecting transaction-level data on tens of millions of households should face limits on sale and sharing, and independent audits of how pricing systems use that data.
Electronic shelf labels may well deliver the operational savings and food-waste reductions their advocates promise. Retailers that commit to uniform in-store pricing have nothing to fear from these rules, and much to gain in the trust of their customers.
