Walmart is rolling out digital price tags that can change what you pay for groceries in real time.
Now Trump's FTC just ordered Walmart to explain exactly how it decides what you pay at checkout.
What Walmart filed at the US Patent Office while telling customers it has nothing to hide is exactly what the FTC wants explained.
What Is Surveillance Pricing and Why Nine Companies Cannot Seem to Explain It
Surveillance pricing is when a company uses everything it knows about you to charge you the highest price it thinks you will pay before you walk away.
Delta, United, JetBlue, Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, Instacart, Target, and Walmart – nine companies most Americans use every single week – are now under federal order to prove they aren't charging you more than your neighbor based on your browsing history.
FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson – Trump's appointee running the agency – issued formal information orders on October 28, demanding full answers within 45 days.
"Consumers deserve to know whether companies use their web surfing habits or other personal data to estimate the highest price they can charge each consumer," Ferguson said.
The software retailers now buy tracks mouse movements, device model, purchase history, and location – then prices each shopper individually.
Ferguson wants to know whether America's biggest brands are pointing that technology at your wallet.
When a customer complained about fluctuating ticket prices, JetBlue's own social media account suggested clearing "cache and cookies or booking with an incognito window" – an admission that browsing history was changing what that customer was charged.
JetBlue deleted the post, then told Fox Business that fares are determined by demand and availability and that all customers have access to the same prices.
Dynamic Pricing Has Existed for 26 Years and the Technology Targeting You Now Is Unrecognizable
Amazon tried this in the year 2000 – for six days they charged different customers different prices for the same DVDs, and when customers compared notes online, the backlash forced Amazon to cancel the experiment entirely.
Today the software adjusts prices millions of times a day using data most shoppers never agreed to share: income estimates, phone model, how quickly they tend to buy, and what zip code they live in.
The FTC's 2025 study confirmed that intermediary companies providing surveillance pricing tools – including Mastercard and McKinsey – were already selling those products to major retailers and service providers.
That study went after the middlemen selling the technology.
This October 2026 inquiry goes straight to the companies doing the pricing themselves – and every one of them has denied it.
Walmart Filed Personalized Pricing Patents While Telling Customers It Would Never Do It
Earlier this year, Walmart quietly secured two pricing patents from the US Patent and Trademark Office while publicly insisting it prices "the product, not the person."
The first covers a system that automatically adjusts what customers pay based on predicted demand and how much individual shoppers have historically been willing to pay.
The second covers a software tool that forecasts demand and recommends prices across food, clothing, housewares, and dozens of other product categories.
One of those patents goes further – explicitly stating that "the labels and prices may be changed in a dynamic fashion" based on what Walmart already knows about what is in a shopper's cart through its scan-and-go checkout.
When the patents surfaced publicly, Walmart CEO John Furner sent customers a reassurance letter while a company spokesperson dismissed the filings: "a patent isn't a plan."
Walmart is also installing electronic shelf labels across all 4,600 US stores by the end of 2026 – the hardware that makes instant price changes possible at the shelf.
Americans already squeezed by four years of Biden inflation are now being targeted a second time by pricing software that identifies who will pay more and charges them accordingly.
Ferguson is giving these nine companies 45 days to prove they didn't do it – and Walmart's own patent filings are already making that very difficult.
Sources:
- Michael Sinkewicz, "FTC probes whether major US companies charge customers different prices using personal data," Fox Business, October 29, 2026.
- Federal Trade Commission, "FTC Launches Personalized Pricing and Compensation Inquiry," FTC.gov, October 28, 2026.
- Federal Trade Commission, "FTC Surveillance Pricing Study Indicates Wide Range of Personal Data Used to Set Individualized Consumer Prices," FTC.gov, January 2025.
- Federal Trade Commission, Proposed Enforcement Policy Statement on Personalized Pricing, FTC.gov, August 2026.
