Seattle City Council has passed a ban on surveillance pricing by grocery retailers. Under surveillance pricing a retailer uses information it has gathered about individual customers to determine what price the customer is charged.
The grocery union United Food and Commercial Workers has been pushing for such bans nationwide. Seattle’s Fair Pricing and Transparency ordinance — the first city law in the country banning surveillance pricing — was in response to advocacy from UFCW Local 3000 and from MLK Labor, the central labor council in King County. The Sept. 22 vote was 7-2, and the ban will take effect Sept. 1, 2027.
The ban will apply to grocery stores and grocery delivery services like Instacart. But it doesn’t prevent retailers from offering discounts based on bulk purchases, loyalty card programs, or discounts for veterans or seniors.
Local 3000 celebrated passage of the ordinance with a press statement: “We believe that today’s vote means that Seattle shoppers will pay the same price for the same product when they’re shopping at the same store, and that grocery store workers won’t have to spend time trying to explain secret algorithmic decisions to customers expressing understandable frustration and confusion over paying different prices for the same items.”
Nothing is simple (in legislative word salad, that is). Note the rather abstruse, hard for anybody under the sun to reliably construe the operative meaning of, and thus arguably poorly crafted language of Amend. C to CB 121267) below [ostensibly allowing for “loyalty” discounts to be offered to customers who previously purchased quantities of item(s)]. Can you (or your lawyers) decode the following abstruse “word salad”(?):
“Allow purchase history to be among the eligible criteria for discounts offered to all consumers, and remove requirement that these discounts must be ones that any consumer could potentially be eligible for; and
Allow for discounts offered to subsets of loyalty program members to be based “primarily” on purchase history, without parameters on the use of purchase history or personal information.”
[ https://seattle.legistar.com/View.ashx?M=F&ID=15870642&GUID=97C79928-7AD5-4075-9732-F5D6EA5731C6 ]