---
title: "The FTC wants retailers to say when the price is yours alone"
description: "\"When consumers see a listed price, they expect it to be the same price that everyone else sees,\" said chairman Andrew Ferguson. Not disclosing personalized pricing could be an unfair or deceptive practice. Comments close on 18 September."
category: "Companies"
category_url: https://boursel.com/category/companies
author: "Olivia Chen"
published: 2026-08-24T22:37:40.000Z
updated: 2026-08-24T22:37:40.000Z
canonical: https://boursel.com/article/the-ftc-wants-retailers-to-say-when-the-price-is-yours-alone
tags: ["ftc", "pricing", "retail", "regulation", "ai", "consumers"]
---
# The FTC wants retailers to say when the price is yours alone

"When consumers see a listed price, they expect it to be the same price that everyone else sees," said chairman Andrew Ferguson. Not disclosing personalized pricing could be an unfair or deceptive practice. Comments close on 18 September.

The Federal Trade Commission is [seeking public comment on an enforcement policy statement on personalized pricing](https://fortune.com/2026/08/24/ftc-retailers-personalized-pricing-consumer-surveillance/), which it defines as using personal data to work out how much an individual consumer is willing to spend. The proposal warns that failing to disclose the practice could violate the FTC Act's prohibition on unfair or deceptive acts. Comments close on 18 September.

"When consumers see a listed price, they expect it to be the same price that everyone else sees," said chairman Andrew Ferguson.

## The word doing the work is disclose

This is not a proposal to ban personalized pricing. It is a proposal that hiding it may be illegal, which is a different and much more achievable thing.

That distinction is the whole design. Banning price discrimination outright would collide with practices nobody objects to, including student discounts, off-peak fares and coupons, all of which charge different people different amounts on purpose. Requiring disclosure leaves the practice legal and moves the question to whether the customer knows.

It is also enforceable with tools the commission already has. An enforcement policy statement is not a rule with the force of legislation; it is the agency setting out how it reads existing law, which means companies get their guidance from the risk of being sued rather than from a new statute.

## What the FTC says is technically possible

The commission's January 2025 surveillance pricing study, which followed orders in July 2024 to eight pricing technology companies, found that intermediaries could use inputs ranging from a consumer's precise location and browser history to shopping behavior and even mouse movements. Those companies had worked with at least 250 clients.

Mouse movements is the detail worth pausing on. Hesitating over a product is a signal about how much you want it, and a system that reads hesitation is reading something the customer did not choose to disclose and probably does not know is legible.

The named sectors are grocery retailers and e-commerce, and electronic shelf labels are specifically in scope. A paper price tag can only be changed by a person walking the aisle. A digital one can be changed continuously, and the same infrastructure that allows a store to reprice for demand allows it to reprice for a customer.

## The airline version, six hours later

We reported this morning that [Delta's chief executive said AI could raise the airline's profit margin by as much as half](/delta-says-ai-could-raise-its-profit-margin-by-half-and-3-percent-of-fares-alrea), from around 10 percent to around 15, and that Delta denies pricing individuals from personal data while using aggregated data for recommendations.

We wrote then that the question stops being about one company's ethics and becomes about what pricing rules apply to everyone, and that this is a legislative question rather than a corporate one. The FTC has now moved on precisely that question, in a different industry, on the same day.

Note what the commission's framing would do to Delta's defence if it were applied to airlines. Delta's position is that it does not target individuals with personal data. A disclosure standard built around whether the listed price is the same price everyone else sees does not depend on how the segmentation was built. It depends on whether the number you are shown is the number your neighbour is shown.

## What it would cost to comply

Very little, technically, and quite a lot commercially.

Displaying a notice is trivial. The difficulty is that personalized pricing works partly because it is invisible: a customer who knows the price was set for them can compare, wait, use a different device, or simply feel cheated, and each of those responses erodes the margin the technique was there to capture.

That is the real content of a disclosure rule. It does not forbid the practice. It removes the conditions in which the practice pays.

Whether the statement survives the comment period in this form is a separate matter, and retailers and their trade associations have until 18 September to argue otherwise.