The Algorithm Knows You’re Hungry—and It’s Already Raising the Grocery Prices in Maryland

 

If dynamic pricing hits grocery stores, Maryland shoppers won’t buy food anymore—they’ll be tracked, analyzed, and squeezed by invisible machines that raise prices precisely when hunger, weather, or paydays leave no escape. 

I walk into a grocery store expecting the usual ritual. Grab a cart. Nod at the automatic doors. Drift toward the cereal aisle like a sleepwalker with a list. Prices used to sit still, quiet and dumb, printed on paper tags like they were ashamed to move. Now imagine those prices blinking back at me, alive, twitchy, watching. That is the future being debated in Maryland, and it smells less like fresh bread and more like a trap.

The warning came wrapped in a calm news voice, but I heard the alarm screaming underneath. Electronic shelf labels are creeping in. Algorithms already track how we shop. Put the two together and you don’t have a grocery store anymore. You have a live market experiment where every shopper is data and every dollar is fair game. If this technology spreads unchecked, I won’t be buying food. I’ll be hunted by invisible pricing machines that watch, learn, and squeeze, turning a normal run for milk into a real-time financial ambush.

We’ve seen this movie before. Rideshares wrote the script. Airlines perfected it. Sports teams cashed the checks. The price jumps when demand spikes. The spike happens when people have no choice. Miss a flight, need a ride home in the rain, want to see your kid’s favorite team. Surge pricing isn’t an accident; it’s a strategy. The same math that decides when to raise an Uber fare can decide when to raise the price of eggs. The difference is that you can skip a concert. You can’t skip dinner.

Supporters of this tech say it’s efficient. I say efficiency is just a clean word for extraction. Algorithms don’t have empathy. They have objectives. Increase margin. Optimize yield. When retailers map shopping habits, time of day, weather, local events, and income patterns, they aren’t guessing. They are predicting. And prediction is power. When the fox writes the rules, the henhouse becomes a spreadsheet.

There’s a reason people recoil when they hear that food prices could change by the hour. Food is not a luxury. It is survival. In basic economics, markets work when buyers and sellers share information. Dynamic pricing breaks that balance. The seller knows everything. The buyer knows nothing until the register beeps. That’s not a market; that’s a stacked deck.

History backs this up. During disasters, price spikes follow like clockwork. After Hurricane Katrina, investigations documented dramatic increases in gasoline, ice, and food prices in affected regions. Economists argued about incentives while families argued about dinner. The public reaction was fierce enough that states tightened price-gouging laws. The lesson was simple and brutal. When necessities get priced like stocks, trust collapses.

More recently, digital markets have shown how fast this can go wrong. Investigations into online retail pricing found that some platforms adjust prices multiple times a day based on demand signals and consumer behavior. A well-known study of e-commerce pricing patterns showed frequent price discrimination, where different users saw different prices for the same product based on browsing history and location. That was for electronics and books. Now imagine it for bread and baby formula. The hand that feeds you shouldn’t also be picking your pocket.

This is why the debate in Maryland matters. Governor Wes Moore and state leaders aren’t arguing about technology in the abstract. They’re arguing about boundaries. The proposed Protection from Predatory Price Act aims to freeze grocery prices for at least one business day and block the use of surveillance data for price manipulation. Critics call it heavy-handed. I call it a seatbelt before the crash.

Retailers already use electronic shelf labels. That part is real and documented. The labels save labor and reduce errors. Fine. The danger isn’t the label; it’s the wire behind it. Once prices can change in seconds, temptation follows. A heat wave hits. Bottled water creeps up. A snowstorm rolls in. Bread ticks higher. Paydays cluster on Fridays. By Friday afternoon, the algorithm smiles. No one announces the increase. No clerk shrugs in apology. The shelf just updates, silent as a pickpocket.

We’ve seen how fast public trust erodes when companies admit to “testing” dynamic pricing. In early 2024, a major fast-food chain floated the idea of dynamic pricing using digital menus. The backlash was immediate and vicious. Customers heard what I hear. If you’ll do this to a burger, you’ll do it to anything. The company walked it back, but the signal was clear. The industry is thinking about it because the math works.

And the math always works best on the poor. Studies on price sensitivity show that lower-income shoppers are more likely to shop during off-hours, more likely to buy staples, and less able to absorb sudden increases. An algorithm trained on behavior will learn that pain point fast. A rising tide lifts yachts, not rowboats. Supporters say competition will keep prices honest. That’s a fairy tale from a different century. Grocery markets are consolidated. A handful of chains dominate regions. If they all install the same tech, the same vendors, the same analytics, competition becomes theater. Prices won’t collude in smoke-filled rooms. They’ll harmonize in the cloud.

The fines in the proposed law—up to $10,000 for a first offense and $25,000 for subsequent ones—sound big, but compared to grocery revenues, they are warnings, not weapons. Still, enforcement matters. Treating violations as unfair or deceptive trade practices puts teeth behind the words. It tells retailers that food is different. It tells consumers someone is watching the watchers.

I don’t hate technology. I hate asymmetry. I hate systems that smile while they squeeze. I hate the idea that a parent standing in a cereal aisle could be outgunned by code written a thousand miles away. The future doesn’t have to be this way. We can draw lines. We can say that some prices should stand still long enough for people to breathe. Because once food pricing goes fully dynamic, the grocery store stops being a place of choice and becomes a place of exposure. Every step is tracked. Every pause is priced. Every need is monetized in real time. That isn’t shopping. That’s hunting season, and the shoppers are the prey.

If Maryland gets this wrong, the blinking labels won’t just show prices. They’ll show who we decided to protect and who we decided to test. And once the machines learn how to squeeze, they never forget.

 

 

As a side note for regular readers, I’ve also written “Swept Away: The Heartbreaking Camp Mystic Flood That Shook America”, now available on Google Play Books. You can also read it here on Google Play: Swept Away.