This Won’t End Well… Seattle Becomes First City To Price-Fix Your Groceries

Authored by Mark Harmsworth via the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE)

This week the Seattle City Council passed Mayor Katie Wilson’s “Fair Pricing and Transparency” ordinance in a 7-2 vote, a first-in-the-nation ban on so-called surveillance pricing.

The ordinance takes effect in 2027. The Washington Retail Association warned for months that the bill was rushed, would have significant and negative impact on prices, and that nearly all suggested fixes were ignored.

As approved, retailers must decide whether they can keep offering the tailored discounts and loyalty programs that Seattle families actually use or cancel all the programs and charge more for groceries.

Government should not be price-fixing consumer products.

Banning the use of loyalty cards and programs, fuel rewards, and targeted coupons hurts businesses and consumers alike.

Price controls do not make groceries cheaper. They flatten the tools stores use to compete for customers. When discounts vanish, the shelf price becomes the only price. That is how an “affordability” law raises a customer’s grocery bill. A Greater Seattle Business Association and Seattle Latino Metropolitan Chamber guest column put it plainly: trying to control prices through experimental regulation has never worked, and this ordinance will make an already expensive city more unaffordable.

Jan Himebaugh of the Washington Retail Association offered a household example, nearly $1,000 in grocer loyalty savings this year for her family, the equivalent of more than 185 gallons of gas in a state where fuel is among the nation’s most expensive. Those are not corporate talking points. They are the coupons that keep a cart full.

Thin-margin stores close. When they close, the result is the very “food deserts” Mayor Wilson has spent a campaign and a mayoralty promising to fight. Wilson has said Seattle will not accept food deserts as the cost of doing business, but the “Fair Pricing” policy creates a retail environment that does exactly the opposite.

A pricing ordinance that chases discounts out of the city works against that goal. You cannot subsidize corner markets on Sunday and make their discount model legally hazardous on Tuesday.

If Wilson wants more grocery access, the path is not to micromanage how a retailer prices a gallon of milk. It is to stop piling first-in-the-nation experiments onto businesses already carrying Seattle’s tax and regulatory load.

Personalized discounts are not surveillance. They are how competitive stores keep prices down and stay open. Kill those discounts, and the desert grows.

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