Lawmakers are making it clear that they don’t agree with Kroger’s recent announcement on how they plan to implement technology into the pricing of their products.
Kroger and Walmart, two of the biggest grocery brands in this country, are reportedly planning to increase their revenue by adding digital price tags in their stores. These price tags would use facial recognition to determine how much to charge each individual shopper for a particular product.
Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib slammed Kroger for ‘surge pricing’ on groceries after facial recognition and digital price tags were announced.
Tlaib took to social media and penned a letter addressing the grocery chain’s use of electronic shelving labels.
Her criticism came after Kroger announced plans to expand its implementation of digital price tags to 2,600 stores by 2026 after first introducing them in 2018.
In addition, they’ve announced plans to use facial recognition technology to offer targeted coupons. Meanwhile, Walmart has been testing digital price tags with fluctuating prices that could change between the time you pick an item off the shelf and check out at the cash register. They currently have it at 60 locations but will be ramping up to 2,300 locations by 2026.
“ESLs or digital price tags may result in Kroger deploying dynamic pricing for goods, increasing the price of essential goods on shelves based on real-time conditions and inventory and creating both confusion and hardship for my residents,” Tlaib’s letter read. “My concern is that these tools will be abused in the pursuit of profit, surging prices on essential goods in areas with fewer and fewer grocery stores.”
While both Walmart and Kroger have promised that they will not be using these digital additions to implement surge pricing, it’s a bit hard for consumers to trust two billion-dollar companies that are obsessed with making sure they’re bringing in as much profit as possible. Especially considering they’ve already started implementing these price changes in front of people’s eyes.
Tlaib also pointed out that Kroger’s plan to use facial recognition could allow them to profile customers.
“The use of facial recognition tools has the potential to invade a customer’s privacy and employ biased price discrimination,” her letter read, pointing out that the grocery store chain could not only build profiles on customers but charge them accordingly based on data gathered.
Tlaib’s poignant letter echoed the same concerns that other politicians had, including Elizabeth Warren and Bob Casey, who also wrote a letter to Kroger saying that “widespread adoption of digital price tags appears poised to enable large grocery stores to squeeze consumers to increase profits.”
“Analysts have indicated that the widespread use of dynamic pricing will result in groceries and other consumer goods being ‘priced like airline tickets,'” they wrote. It doesn’t help that facial recognition software is notoriously discriminatory.
Research conducted by Black scholars Joy Buolamwini, Deb Raji, and Timnit Gebru in 2018 concluded that some facial analysis algorithms misclassified Black women nearly 35% of the time while nearly always getting it right for white men.
In late 2019, the federal government released its own report on bias issues in facial recognition algorithms, finding that the systems generally work best on middle-aged white men’s faces, and not so well for people of color, women, children, or the elderly.
In a time when families are struggling to buy groceries and the numbers relating to food insecurity in a plethora of households are staggering and concerning, the last thing shoppers need is to feel exploited by the very stores they depend on for something as basic as food to put on the table.
In many areas of this country, Kroger and Walmart are sometimes the only grocery stores they have access to, and it’s incredibly unfortunate that both stores are actively trying to take advantage of that.
Nia Tipton is a Chicago-based entertainment, news, and lifestyle writer whose work delves into modern-day issues and experiences.
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