ACCORDING TO LIZ - It’s been over three years since I last railed against those annoying price-look-up stickers defiling our fruits and vegetables, gumming up our compost heaps, and frowned upon by organics recyclers across the country.
The proliferation of plastics in multiple forms is a significant contributor to environmental damage as well as to climate change, and take generations to break down.
Corporations used PLUs to replace workers who used to track inventory with machines to identify products, compute costs and maintain inventory, and make replacing cashiers a breeze since speed at the check-out no longer relied on experienced employees’ knowledge.
Around the world, waste management companies and recycling experts advocated for their outright banning as PLU-contaminated organic waste ended up in landfills, creating more methane with a global warming potential 25 times that of carbon dioxide.
Microplastic pollution endangers our oceans and waterways but the skin tags from the thin layer plastic of PLUs has the potential to pollute our land more than 20 times over.
Because, though small, when multiplied by the billions of products necessary to leverage up corporate profit margins, they exist in freaking huge numbers. And more every day we permit them to pollute our food chain.
My recommendation back when writing the initial article was to pay a penny more per item to safeguard well-paid cashiers and human inventory trackers. And lose the PLUs.
Instead, grocery retailers and their bloated corporate profiteering owners and investors went down an entirely different road introducing an insidious plan to make even more money, again targeting their own employees as well as customers: electronic shelf labels.
A recent report argues that this technology – which sanctions multiple price changes times per day and allows manufacturers to collect mammoth amounts of personal data from customers to further increase profits and slash labor costs – is a direct attack on the American consumer.
It uses the same pricing systems that allow dynamic pricing – price changes Americans have seen such as increasing allergy medication prices when pollen counts are high – and surveillance pricing.
Surveillance pricing is a form of dynamic pricing where a consumer's personal data and behavior is used to determine their willingness to pay. This form of price discrimination assesses price sensitivity for products or services based on an individual's characteristics and behaviors including location, demographics, browsing patterns, shopping history, and inferred emotional or financial states.
The practice has been described as “personalized pricing” which implies it adds value for consumers. Proponents also argue the practice could be implemented in a manner akin to a progressive tax enabling price equity.
In reality, it perversely pushes price inequities based on obscured algorithms that uniquely provide for increased manufacturer and retail profits at the expense of the consumer.
It is, de facto, personalized price-gouging and has led to outcries against algorithmic discrimination, consumer privacy, digital redlining, and undermining price discovery.
From when a customer puts an item in their basket until they reach the checkout line, the price could jump significantly. It could also drop but, considering the intent of the technology is to augment profits, the few minutes it takes to cross the store to the cashier allows bots to access just how much that person can afford to pay.
Not just what they think it’s worth to them which initiated their decision to pick the product off the shelf.
Perniciously, this type of pricing is already hitting consumers. Hard. In their wallets.
A recent article in The Guardian reports that the two biggest convenience-store chains in the United States – 7-Eleven and Circle K “routinely charge customers more than the shelf prices for snacks, beverages, toiletries, tobacco and medications.
“Between 2023 and 2025, Circle K locations failed 35% of their government price-accuracy inspections in Florida, 62% in North Carolina and 82% in Columbus, Ohio. Over the same period, its larger rival, 7-Eleven, flunked 47% of inspections in both Colorado and Utah and 79% in Ontario county in upstate New York.”
Furthermore, price-accuracy inspectors flunked 26% of dollar stores and 27% of auto parts stores.
A state inspection of at a single 7-Eleven receipt in Casa Grande, Arizona, found 12 out of 25 items rang up higher at the checkout than what was marked on the shelf – a 48% error rate.
If only employers would make such errors on our paychecks!
Added to these “inconveniences,” consistent overcharging at “convenience” vendor fuel pumps further stresses consumers’ limited finances, already overburdened by burgeoning inflation from today's tariffs, war, and domestic turmoil.
People can choose to boycott minor miscreants once their price machinations are revealed, but what to do when the major retailers jump on board with more sophisticated tools of deception?
An analysis by the AFL-CIO Tech Institute of electronic shelf label manufacturers’ own marketing materials found the universal adoption of these labels, marketed to retailers as an expense-cutting measure, could cost workers between $1.6 billion and $6.9 billion in lost wages annually and could impact almost 200,000 jobs.
And the AFL-CIO’s policy brief, Priced Out, Pushed Out: Electronic Shelf Labels Raise Prices and Shrink Paychecks, calls for an outright ban on electronic labels to protect consumers and workers.
Food prices have risen by a third in seven years, skyrocketing well above average inflation and wage gain levels. In addition, surge or dynamic pricing technology, where charges increase with demand, is spreading like a cancer between airlines, ride-hailing services, Amazon and Ticketmaster, and promises to twist the knife even deeper.
A May poll released by the United Food and Commercial Workers union found 68% of Americans believe surveillance pricing will increase grocery costs and 65% say digital price tags will do the same. About 67% support banning digital price tags and surveillance pricing, with only 26% opposing a ban.
Maryland became the first state in the US to ban the practice last April. Connecticut signed a ban in June, and New Jersey in July. Legislation to ban surveillance pricing and electronic shelf labels is currently making headway in a number of other states.
An Instacart pilot program allowing retailers to charge online shoppers different prices for the same products was shut down after an investigation by Consumer Reports and Groundwork Collaborative found grocery prices differed as much as 23% between customers.
There exists true evil in a technology that pursues extracting the most money as inhumanly possible out of customers while squeezing out already underpaid workers and creating conflicted working conditions for those who remain.
Don't wait till it empties your bank account; call your elected officials and make your position known.
(Liz Amsden is a former Angeleno now living in Vermont and a regular CityWatch contributor. She writes on issues she’s passionate about, including social justice, government accountability, and community empowerment. Liz brings a sharp, activist voice to her commentary and continues to engage with Los Angeles civic affairs from afar. She can be reached at [email protected].)
