The Most Kitchen-Table Issue There Is: Stopping Predatory Pricing on Household Goods

Earlier in this campaign, I started talking about something most people hadn't heard of yet. I brought it up on my TikTok lives. I brought it up on porches. After thousands of doors in West Jordan, Sandy, and Midvale, I can tell you what comes up more than anything else, and it isn't the fight of the week on cable news. It's affordability. Groceries, gas, rent. People tell me the paycheck that used to stretch to the 26th now runs dry around the 17th.

It first got my attention last spring. In March, CNBC reported that Walmart would have digital price tags on every shelf in every U.S. store by the end of the year. In April, NPR's Morning Edition sat down with Consumer Reports' Grace Gedye as Maryland moved to become the first state to ban what regulators call surveillance pricing in grocery stores, and she put it plainly: companies now know "orders of magnitude more" about each of us than they used to. Days later, the Guardian reported that Maryland had done it, and that advocates were already worried about the loopholes. That's when I started digging.

Everybody running for office says they care about kitchen-table issues. Fine. Nothing is more kitchen table than the things you actually use the kitchen table for: the eggs, the milk, the bread, the formula, the plate you set in front of your kid. If a legislator is supposed to represent the everyday voter, this is where the job starts.

So here's what I've been talking about. Stores now have the tools to use what they know about you to work out the most you'll pay before you walk away, and then charge you that. I call it predatory pricing. It isn't common in Utah grocery aisles yet. I want to stop it before it is.

The price of eggs for you should be the price of eggs for me. For most of my life that went without saying. The tag on the shelf didn't know who you were. It showed the same number to the retiree on a fixed income and the guy who just got paid, and that shared number is what let you compare one store against another. Predatory pricing quietly gets rid of it.

I've written a bill to stop it, the Utah One Price Act. I'm going to walk you through it the way I'd explain it on a porch, including the parts I went back and forth on, because you should be able to see how a bill works before anyone asks for your vote.

How it works

Every swipe of a loyalty card, every tap in a store's app, every online order leaves a trail: what you buy and when, where you live, what phone you're on, what you searched for and didn't buy. Data brokers will sell a store the rest. Run all of that through pricing software and you get a decent guess at your income, whether you have kids, how badly you need something, and how hard you'll push back on a price.

Picture a dad searching "infant fever reducer" at 1 a.m. The software doesn't need his name to know he isn't going to comparison shop.

That guess can be used two ways. The obvious one is a higher price for the shopper the data says will pay it. The quieter one is the coupon that never shows up. The deal goes to the shopper who would have walked, and skips the one who can't. Regulators call this surveillance pricing. I call it predatory, because that's what it is. It's old-fashioned price discrimination with more computing power and less daylight. And you'd never know, because you can't see what the person behind you in line was charged or offered.

What we actually know

I don't want to overstate this, so here's what's documented.

In December 2025, Consumer Reports and its partners ran a test with more than 400 volunteers in four cities. They built identical Instacart carts at the same time, from the same stores. Nearly three-quarters of the items came up at different prices for different people. On basics like cereal and peanut butter, the gap averaged around 13 percent. A box of Wheat Thins at one Seattle Safeway varied by as much as 23 percent. Instacart's own materials admitted shoppers didn't know they were in an experiment.

To be fair to Instacart, the company says those tests were random, not aimed at anyone. It ended them within two weeks and promised that two families buying the same things, from the same store, at the same time, would see the same prices. Good. But random price tests are how these systems learn what different people will pay. That's how the machine gets trained.

Then in August, the Federal Trade Commission put out a proposed policy on personalized pricing, and its own examples read like things nobody should have to imagine: a grocer charging more for milk because the data suggests there are kids in the house, and a hotel charging more to someone traveling for a funeral. Those are the federal government's examples. I didn't have to make them up.

Now the other side, honestly. The evidence doesn't show this happening in Utah grocery stores today. Walmart's CEO, John Furner, put it about as plainly as anyone can. "We price the product, not the person," he wrote. Research the Associated Press reported in October found virtually no surge pricing after one grocery chain installed digital shelf labels. I believe them. That's exactly why I'm pushing now.

Why now, and not after

The digital labels are going up store by store, and the pricing software is already for sale to anyone who wants it. Most of the data has been piling up for years. All the parts are on the shelf.

Fifteen years as an advocate at the Capitol taught me something about timing. Once an industry has built its profits around a practice, it gets a seat at the table when the rules are written, and the rules come out shaped to fit. Draw the line before anyone builds on the wrong side of it and the fight gets a lot smaller, for shoppers and for the honest businesses that never wanted to play that game.

There's also a hole in Utah law. Our Consumer Privacy Act lets you opt out of targeted ads and the sale of your data. Nothing in it stops a store from using the data it already has to set your price. We protected your information from being sold. We never protected it from being used against you at the register.

This isn't a left-or-right idea, either. In 2026, a Republican senator and a Republican representative brought a bill to stop businesses from using your personal data to raise your price. A Democratic senator brought one requiring a disclosure label. Neither passed. Both sides saw the problem. I'm trying to finish the job.

If you read my June post, I called this the Utah Essential Goods Pricing Fairness Act. Same fight. The new name just says what it does.

What the bill does

It's limited to essential goods, the stuff you can't put off. In the kitchen, that means groceries, including formula and baby food, plus baby bottles, paper towels, trash bags, and pet food. In the medicine cabinet, it's over-the-counter medicine, basic first aid, diabetic testing supplies, and home medical tests. In the bathroom, it's diapers and wipes for babies and adults, menstrual products, soap, toothpaste, shampoo, deodorant, toilet paper, and tissue. Add cleaning supplies and everyday clothing and shoes, and that's the list.

I'll admit my first instinct was broader. I wanted the same rule for everything in the store, from eggs to underwear to a TV. I narrowed it on purpose. A family can put off a new television. Nobody puts off formula. That's where this kind of pricing does the most damage, so that's where the line goes. Where Utah law already defines something like food, medicine, or clothing, the bill borrows that definition instead of inventing a new one.

Then it sets three rules.

One price. Every essential item has one posted price, the same for everybody, and nobody can be charged more. Your data can't push it higher, and a store can't run secret tests showing different shoppers different prices at the same moment. Online, it's the price anyone can see before signing in, for the store filling the order, and it's the same whatever your ZIP code or purchase history.

Every deal stays, but no secret deals. This is the part I went back and forth on most. My first draft left every coupon and app deal wide open, as long as the price stayed under the shelf tag. Then I had the whole thing pulled apart from every angle I could think of. I looked at how a lawyer would attack it, how a grocery lobbyist would get around it, and how a Republican committee chair would read it. The same hole kept showing up. A store could post a high price and use your data to decide who gets the discount, and the shopper with no time or no other store nearby would pay full freight.

Now a deal set by data or pricing software has to be published, open to anyone who qualifies, and the same deal for everyone who qualifies. Qualifying has to rest on something real, like membership, age, military service, or how many you buy, never on a score of how desperate you look. Coupons, loyalty prices, buy-one-get-one, and senior and veteran discounts are all still there. The store can still pick who gets the email. It just can't decide the tired mom at 9 p.m. doesn't get the deal everybody else got.

A daily ceiling at the big chains. At large retailers, whatever price is set overnight is the most anyone pays for that item that day. Prices can drop and come back all day, so flash sales and markdowns still work. What can't happen is eggs climbing at 5:30 because the after-work crowd walked in. Is it airtight? No. A chain could set its overnight price high. But grocers mostly change shelf prices on a weekly schedule, and a price that's the same for every shopper is a price you can compare.

Who it's for, and who it leaves alone

This bill is aimed at the companies with the data and the algorithms, not the family business on the corner.

Every store, big or small, follows the basic rule. One posted price, and nobody charged more. Small stores already work that way. Everything else applies only to large retailers: the daily ceiling, a public list of deals, the record-keeping, and the bigger penalties. A large retailer is a company with $25 million or more in revenue that also holds data on at least 100,000 Utahns.

So the farm stand can still raise its egg price at noon. The corner store owner can still knock a dollar off for a regular. Warehouse clubs keep their membership model, fees and all. I made sure of that, because a bill like this is only worth passing if it hits the right people.

Teeth where it counts

I said it back in June and I'll keep saying it: a fine that amounts to a minor cost of doing business isn't accountability. It's a licensing fee for continued abuse.

I also don't want a scanner glitch treated like a scheme, so the bill draws a line. Every overcharged shopper gets refunded, whether the store meant it or not. Fines are for knowing, reckless, or repeat violations, and an honest mistake that's fixed and refunded within 30 days doesn't get fined. For the big chains, violations count per item, per store, per day, fines scale with the size of the company, and repeat offenses double. A shopper hurt by a knowing violation at a large retailer can recover at least $500. I expect a fight over that piece. I think it's worth having.

All of it runs through the Utah Consumer Sales Practices Act, on the books since 1973, so there's no new agency. The Division of Consumer Protection can send in secret shoppers to catch what no customer would ever see. And proof is simple. Your receipt or coupon gets checked against what was posted, and a photo or a screenshot counts.

What it doesn't do matters too. It doesn't tell any business what to charge. It doesn't ban digital labels, apps, loyalty programs, or AI, and it doesn't take a single deal off the table. It says the price you post is the price, for everyone, and the deals you offer are open to anyone who qualifies.

Why I care about this one

I am not anti-market. I am anti-rigged market.

Utah is a state of budgeters. We keep pantries. We plan meals around the weekly ad, buy in bulk when it goes on sale, and teach our kids to do the same. All of that depends on prices that hold still long enough to plan around. A price that moves depending on who's looking punishes exactly the habits we're proud of.

Honest businesses should want this too. The best retailers already say they price the product, not the person. This makes that the floor, so nobody gets ahead by squeezing shoppers and undercutting the competitors who play it straight.

Some questions are still open, and I'll keep working on them with anyone willing to sit down. The big one is where exactly the large-retailer line should sit. I'm also still working out how online and shelf prices should line up, and what a fair penalty looks like for a company with billions in sales. I'd rather argue those out in the open than pretend a first draft is perfect.

The families I talk to are already doing the math on every trip to the store. The last thing they need is the store doing math on them.

The bill file is written and ready for the 2027 session. Send me to the Capitol, and I'll carry it.

A price should be a fact about the product. It should never be a verdict about the person buying it.