The Algorithm Was Reading Your Diary Before It Set the Price
Somewhere behind the register at your grocery store, a system has been quietly building a file on you: your race, your gender, your employment status, what you've been browsing online, and — this is the detail that made everyone sit up — what you've been telling chatbots. Not to recommend a recipe. To decide whether you, specifically, would tolerate a 23% markup on the same bag of rice the person ahead of you bought for less.
On September 23, the Seattle City Council voted 7-2 to make that illegal, becoming the first city in the country to ban "surveillance pricing" outright. Mayor Katie Wilson co-sponsored the Fair Pricing and Transparency ordinance alongside Councilmembers Alexis Mercedes Rinck, Dionne Foster, and Rob Saka. The Algorithm, dear reader, has been made to show its work, and its work was ugly.
Standard loyalty cards, senior discounts, and veteran discounts remain perfectly legal, because those are prices a human designed on purpose and told you about. The banned version is the one that never announces itself and never applies the same math twice.
$1,200 a Year, Give or Take What It Decided You Could Afford
The number driving the vote comes from a 2025 investigation by Consumer Reports, Groundwork Collaborative, and More Perfect Union: surveillance pricing could tack on roughly $1,200 annually to an average Seattle family's grocery bill, with individual item markups running as high as 23%. Not a service fee. Not inflation. Just a system that inferred you could probably still afford it.
"The price you see shouldn't be different based on who you are," said Consumer Reports' Grace Gedye, a sentence that should not have needed a city ordinance to become true. And yet — as if a hidden 23% surcharge weren't enough — the whole arrangement ran silently enough that most shoppers had no way to know they were the ones subsidizing it.
Seven to Two, Which Still Means Two
The vote wasn't unanimous, which is its own small window into how normalized this had become before anyone wrote it down. Robert Reich called it "a huge win for consumers against companies that abuse their personal data to rip them off," which is the kind of sentence you only need when the alternative — companies not abusing personal data to rip people off — was apparently on the table as an option somebody voted against.
Backing the ordinance: the grocery workers of UFCW Local 3000, the Washington Working Families Party, the Transit Riders Union, and WA People's Privacy — a coalition that, notably, had to organize itself to stop a pricing model nobody at the grocery store ever disclosed to a single customer.
The Fine Print Nobody's Published Yet
What the ordinance doesn't yet spell out, at least not in anything public so far, is exactly how it gets enforced or what it costs a retailer to get caught — the kind of detail that tends to determine whether a ban is a deterrent or a mild scheduling inconvenience. The city named the practice. It has not yet named the price of ignoring the city.
Which leaves the obvious next question for the Retail Pricing Community: whether this is the end of an algorithm quietly reading your chat logs to set your grocery bill, or just the point where it learns to do the same math one city limit over.
Sources: Common Dreams — Seattle Bans "Surveillance Pricing" · Consumer Reports — Seattle City Council Votes to Ban Surveillance Pricing in Sale of Groceries
