I’ve been watching a lot of Naruto recently, and one thing really sticks out to me as unrealistic. It’s not the building-leveling energy blasts, the fire-breathing ninjas, or even the instantly summoned toads… It’s Ichiraku Ramen.
Naruto, a 13-year-old orphan, devours a bowl of ramen almost every episode. No budgets or concerns of rising food prices. Ichiraku’s owner, Teuchi, never seems to be affected by broader economic pressures or by supply and demand.
Even in fiction, we expect something as basic as food to follow rules, supply to meet demand, and prices to be reasonable. It feels strange when these rules are broken, even in a fictional world of magical ninjas.
Ironically, these basic rules are constantly being broken in real life. 10 food categories experienced a one-year inflation of 10% or more. Americans pay 40% more for fruits and vegetables. Food affordability is rapidly becoming a critical issue in the United States.
H.R. 4966, introduced by Rep. Rashida Tlaib in August 2025, is Congress’s attempt to address that in three key areas:
- Price gouging during crises (View Bill Section)
- Stores using your personal data to set their prices (View Bill Section)
- Prohibiting the digital technology that makes it all possible (View Bill Section)
Prohibition on Price Gouging
Imagine eggs cost $3 a dozen in January. Then bird flu hits, supply drops, and by March they’re $7. While to the average person this seems like a product of supply and demand, the growing concern is that someone is taking advantage of a crisis.
That’s the question at the heart of the bill. Before H.R. 4966, there were no federal laws prohibiting price gouging by retail grocery companies. Consequently, grocery prices experienced a monthly increase of 2.7% from last year and have risen by almost 29% overall in 5 years.
Section 2(a) of H.R. 4966 attempts to change by making it illegal to sell groceries at a price that is “unconscionably excessive” during emergencies.
At first glance, this policy seems impossible to oppose. After all, nobody enjoys paying more for groceries. When egg prices more than doubled during the avian flu outbreak or when meat prices surged during COVID-19, consumers felt the consequences immediately. A law preventing corporations from exploiting crises appears like common sense.
Supporters of this bill argue this same point. Essential goods differ from luxury products: if the price of food doubles, families still have to eat. Because the demand for groceries remains relatively stable regardless of price, retailers possess unique leverage during emergencies.
The problem arises when trying to define price gouging. The bill never actually defines what “grossly excessive” prices look like. Instead, it delegates that work to the Federal Trade Commission, which is given 180 days after enactment to set rules. The problem is that this leaves considerable room for ambiguity.
Anti-gouging laws have relied on vague terms for years. The 120% benchmark itself that the bill sets raises its own questions. Such as what counts as a “market”? What happens to products with high natural price volatility, such as meat, produce, and eggs? And how does the bill differentiate between natural price shocks and deliberate gouging?
The bill’s defense is that a store can defend a price hike if it demonstrates that any increase is due to additional costs beyond its control, related to procurement, distribution, or provision of the item. However, this creates a gray zone with cases that aren’t as straightforward.
Surveillance-Based Price Setting
Beyond emergency pricing, the bill attempts to tackle a practice that the average American rarely knows about: personalized pricing. Section 3 of H.R. 4966 bans store operators from adjusting prices based on consumers’ personal information. This includes data collected through facial recognition technology and using electronic shelf labels to change prices for individual consumers.
Here’s how the current system works. Retailers hire third-party firms to use data such as a customer’s location, demographics, browsing history, and shopping habits to predict the maximum amount that an individual is willing to pay. These details can be as granular as someone’s precise location or browser history.
While this idea seems far-fetched, the FTC’s January 2025 surveillance pricing study found that retailers frequently used personal information to set targeted individualized prices for goods and services. In an investigation of Instacart, it was found that its surveillance pricing algorithm led to some consumers paying $1,200 more on groceries each year.
The bill does have carve-outs for surveillance-based price setting. Once again, a store isn’t in violation if a price difference is based solely on reasonable costs of providing the item to different consumers, or if a discount is offered uniformly to all consumers who meet disclosed eligibility criteria. Senior discounts, student deals, and military pricing are all still allowed as long as the criteria are public and the same price is available to everyone who qualifies.
That said, the regulatory landscape for surveillance-based price setting was already moving here before H.R. 4966 was introduced. In 2025 alone, 24 state legislatures introduced over 50 bills to regulate algorithmic pricing. For example, New York’s algorithmic pricing disclosure act requires businesses to display the message “THIS PRICE WAS SET BY AN ALGORITHM USING YOUR PERSONAL DATA” wherever personalized pricing appears. In January 2026, California’s attorney general investigated grocery, retail, and hotel companies for potential violations. Maryland also became the first state to ban surveillance pricing in food in April 2026.
The argument for a federal law is consistency, as a patchwork of state rules leaves consumers in states that haven’t acted. It also means this section of the bill isn’t pioneering new ground as much as it is trying to make the ground universal.
Prohibition on Electronic Shelf Labels
If you walk into a Walmart today, you will notice that the little paper price tags are gone. In their place are small digital screens, also known as ESLs, that can update prices across the entire store and are controlled by a computer in the back. Walmart is rolling them out to 2,300 stores by 2026, and Kroger already has them in 500 locations.
Section 5 prohibits any store larger than 10,000 square feet from using electronic shelf labels. The argument is that if a store has real-time data on who is walking down an aisle, it can change every price in the building extremely fast. To politicians, this is the missing piece to the puzzle that would allow for personalized pricing to expand rapidly.
The problem is that bodies of evidence don’t back this idea up. A UC San Diego study analyzed over 180 million product-level observations before and after stores adopted ESls and found essentially no evidence of surge pricing.
Surprisingly, the researchers found that the technology could actually help lower-income shoppers by making it easier for stores to discount food nearing its expiration date before it gets thrown out. In Europe, where ESLs are more common, that is largely what they are used for. Dutch chain Albert Heijn marks down expiring food throughout the day. Norwegian retailer REMA 1000 has a policy that during store hours, the labels only ever show price cuts.
The real culprit isn’t the screen showing the price but rather the data infrastructure behind it, which is already addressed in Section 3. To put it simply: banning digital shelf labels would force grocers to rely on slower, more wasteful, more costly, and less accurate paper-based systems that would induce further costs on shoppers and discourage numerous timely pricing benefits.
Enforcement
A policy is only as strong as its enforcement, which is where H.R. 4966 is the most credible.
Three main groups are planned to enforce H.R 4966. The FTC can go after violators at the federal level. State attorneys general can sue on behalf of their residents. And most importantly, so can you. If a store violates this law, individual consumers can take them to court and win at least $3,000 per violation. If the store knew what they were doing and did it anyway, that number more than triples. And if you win, the store pays for your legal fees.
While this mechanism sounds modest, most corporate wrongdoing at the consumer level is unchallenged because the harm to one person is too small to justify hiring a lawyer. However, this bill attempts to change the incentive structure to make it financially worth it to sue.
This bill also acts like a floor, not a ceiling. That means that states can go further if they want. Such as when Maryland banned surveillance pricing in food retail outright, or how New York requires stores to tell you when an algorithm sets your price. This bill’s purpose is to simply guarantee a baseline for the states that haven’t done anything yet.
Priced Out of Progress
Grocery prices are up nearly 29% since 2020. Algorithms are deciding what you pay at checkout based on who you are. And when crises hit, there’s nothing stopping stores from quietly widening their margins more than needed. H.R. 4966 is trying to do something about that. However, while parts of it are genuinely well-designed, other parts are shaky and require further work.
The bigger issue isn’t in the bill details. It’s that the bill, as of now, is going nowhere. GovTrack gives it a 1% chance of passing. Yet, food affordability is one of the most broadly felt economic pressures in the country and cuts across party lines and income levels. The politics should be there, the legislation just isn’t, yet.
Teuchi never had to raise Naruto’s prices, and in the real world, someone has to make sure nobody else does either.
