Assembly Commerce and Economic Development Committee advances Fair Price Protection Act after hours of testimony

The Assembly Commerce and Economic Development Committee on a motion released its committee substitute for A4085 and A4523, known as the Fair Price Protection Act, after several hours of testimony and debate. Supporters said the bill would bar retailers from varying grocery prices in whole or in part based on personal data, while opponents warned the language could unintentionally ban common discounts and disrupt modern pricing tools.

Consumer advocates framed the issue as one of fairness and privacy. "Surveillance pricing is discrimination at scale," Anna Cookie Rivera of the Latino Action Network told the committee, urging lawmakers to prohibit the use of sensors, device tracking and other personal data to set grocery prices. Beverly Brown Ruja of New Jersey Citizen Action testified that retailers can build detailed profiles of shoppers and "charge the highest price that an algorithm predicts that customer will pay," citing national studies and rising grocery costs.

Industry witnesses argued the bill, as written, sweeps too broadly. Mary Ellen Popard of the New Jersey Food Council said the measure "jeopardizes the ability of retailers to continue to use coupons, discounts, promotions, loyalty accounts, rebates, points, rewards, even extended sales," and asked for clearer industry-standard definitions. John Hollub of the New Jersey Retail Merchants Association said electronic shelf labels are primarily display tools tied to point-of-sale systems and that many cited examples of personalized pricing are anecdotal.

The committee spent significant time on definitional issues: what counts as a "bona fide discount," how to treat loyalty programs and whether the bill should focus only on price increases rather than discounts. A technical debate over ESL capability followed; a manufacturer representative (Fusion) said current ESL tags are low‑power displays that cannot individually identify customers or silently change a single digit for a given shopper in real time, while some consumer advocates and researchers pointed to online and app‑based pricing tests as proof of concept for discrimination via data.

Privacy and labor groups pushed for a precautionary approach. Suzanne Bernstein of the Electronic Privacy Information Center and Andrew Perot of UFCW argued the state should restrict or at least study the rapid deployment of systems that could be used to charge shoppers different prices based on inferred traits. Consumer Reports warned that narrowing the bill to only "price increases" could create enforcement challenges and allow targeted discounts to be used as a work‑around.

After prolonged questioning and amendment work, the committee voted to release the committee substitute for A4085/A4523 as amended, with the chair and sponsor indicating they would continue to work with stakeholders to clarify definitions and preserve transparent discounts while preventing discriminatory individualized pricing.

Next steps: the bill was released by the committee as amended and will proceed through the Assembly process; sponsors said they expect additional drafting changes following stakeholder meetings. The committee also moved several other bills (see votes at a glance).