Coming Soon to a Grocery Store Near You: Discrimination?

by Jeff Sovern

About nine days ago, the Times ran a front-page article Shopper Alert: Price May Drop for You Alone.  It pointed out that some supermarkets were now charging different prices to different consumers for the same items and raised questions about the practice; one shopper was quoted as calling the practice "a little bit creepy." But the practice also permits discrimination on the basis of ethnicity or gender, as I observed in this letter.  And if you think such discrimination is far-fetched, consider the studies on discrimination in lending (a leading study is Alicia H. Munnell et al., Mortgage Lending in Boston: Interpreting HMDA Data, 86 Amer.Econ. Rev. 25 (1996), but there are plenty of others, including some that claim that such discrimination doesn't occur; many are summarized in Stephen Ross & Ross Yinger, The Color of Credit (2002)) and by car dealers. See Ian Ayres, Fair Driving: Gender and Race Discrimination in Retail Car Negotiations, 104 Harv. L. Rev. 817 (1991).