New Jersey Made It Illegal For Grocery Stores To Use Your Data To Charge You More
Governor Mikie Sherrill signed the Fair Price Protection Act into law at Our Community Grocery Store in Newark, making New Jersey the third state in the country to ban surveillance pricing, a practice in which grocery stores and retailers use a shopper's personal data, including their digital browsing history, location data, biometric information, and purchasing patterns, to run algorithmic calculations estimating the highest price that individual is willing to pay for a given item, and then charge them accordingly. Unlike traditional sales or loyalty discounts, which offer the same price to everyone who qualifies, surveillance pricing is invisible to consumers and produces different prices for different people based on data collected without their knowledge. Sherrill described it directly: surveillance pricing weaponizes your data against you. The law takes effect August 1, 2027, giving retailers time to update their systems, and also imposes a one-year pause on electronic shelf labels, the digital price displays that can change prices instantly throughout a store, while the state evaluates whether the technology could enable the very practices the law is designed to prevent.
The Fair Price Protection Act gives enforcement authority to both the New Jersey attorney general and individual consumers, meaning shoppers who believe they were charged a surveillance-based price can file their own lawsuit against the retailer. Grocery stores found liable face refunds, potential permit revocations, and fines of up to $10,000 for a first violation and $20,000 for each subsequent one under the Consumer Fraud Act. The law explicitly does not prohibit dynamic pricing based on general market demand, traditional loyalty programs, promotions, or coupons, addressing the primary industry objection that the legislation would eliminate the discounts consumers rely on. New Jersey is the third state to pass such a law, following Maryland and Connecticut, and New York has passed similar legislation awaiting a governor's signature. Antoinette Miles of the New Jersey Working Families Party said big corporations have turned grocery shopping into a surveillance operation, tracking what people buy, where they live, and where they shop to calculate the most they can charge each customer individually, and that this law puts a stop to that. For the average shopper, the most important thing to know is simple: from next summer forward, the price on the shelf in New Jersey is the price for everyone.
