1. United States
2. Iowa
3. Letter

I am asking you today to co-sponsor the Stop Price Gouging in Grocery Stores Act of 2026. What I am about to describe is already happening to your voters, and your silence is a choice. The grocery store may know more about you than your doctor — and it’s using that to charge you more. The moment you walk through the doors of a large grocery chain, an algorithm may already be calculating your personal price. The FTC found that a wide range of personal data — including precise location, demographic information, browsing history, and even how long you pause over a product — is routinely used to set individualized prices for the same goods and services. The box of cereal you pick up may cost you more than it costs the person behind you — simply because the system has studied your life and decided what you can bear to pay. It penalizes urgency. If a parent needs a last-minute item for a sick child, the system may detect that desperation and raise the price. If someone shops late at night after a long shift and searches for the same item repeatedly, the algorithm interprets that as vulnerability — and charges accordingly. Electronic shelf labels are the final piece of this puzzle. With ESLs, companies can change prices in the blink of an eye — and when combined with AI tools and data collection, customers don’t stand a chance. You can watch the price change as you reach for the item. This is not innovation. This is digital exploitation — and it hits the most vulnerable hardest. This isn’t just about convenience or “personalization.” The FTC’s own findings confirm that algorithms trained on demographic data can systematically discriminate against disadvantaged groups — and that by estimating each buyer’s maximum willingness to pay, firms charge more to those deemed least price-sensitive. This is digital redlining. It is a system designed to extract the maximum possible amount from people who can least afford it, running silently in the background every time a working family buys groceries. Consumer Reports documented how Instacart showed different prices to different users for identical products, inflating grocery bills by as much as 23 percent based on users’ shopping patterns and browsing history. Wealthier consumers have more time and tools to comparison shop, use privacy protections, and navigate around price manipulation. Working families juggling jobs, childcare, and long commutes don’t have that luxury — and the system takes advantage of that gap. The federal government knew. Then it walked away. In 2024, the FTC under Chair Lina Khan launched a formal investigation into surveillance pricing. Shortly after President Trump took office, his administration killed the inquiry. At the exact moment grocery prices were crushing working families, this administration made a deliberate choice to stand with corporate data miners instead of consumers. That is not a bureaucratic oversight. That is a political decision with a victim — and those victims are your constituents. This is destroying jobs, not just wallets. The United Food and Commercial Workers International Union has launched a national campaign warning that surveillance pricing and AI-driven electronic shelf labels are eliminating good union grocery jobs, destroying fair prices for families, and gutting workers’ livelihoods. Walmart has announced plans to bring electronic shelf labels to all of its locations — technology that replaces the hours grocery workers once spent maintaining prices on shelves. Every ESL installed is a shift that doesn’t get scheduled. The momentum to stop this is real — what’s missing is your vote. New York, Oklahoma, Washington, Arizona, Nebraska, Maryland, and Tennessee have all introduced legislation to protect consumers from surveillance pricing and ban electronic shelf labels. New York Attorney General Letitia James, New Jersey Governor Mikie Sherrill, and California Attorney General Rob Bonta have all moved aggressively against these practices in 2026. States are acting because Congress has not. That ends now — or it ends your relationship with this voter. Here is my specific ask: Co-sponsor the Stop Price Gouging in Grocery Stores Act of 2026. Call publicly on the Trump FTC to resume its killed surveillance pricing investigation. And issue a public statement within 10 days telling your constituents whether you stand with working families or with the corporations surveilling them. Every week you delay, the algorithm gets smarter and my grocery bill gets less fair.