Wes Moore Wes Moore is the Democratic governor of Maryland, with Aruna Miller as lieutenant governor.

“We were seeing how average Marylanders were just getting hosed by these big corporations. And because what they're using is they're using your data against you. When I walk into a grocery store, they know what time you're coming in. They know what you were buying when you were there.”

Marketplace All-in-One · June 2026

Context

Moore on Marketplace Tech, explaining why Maryland became the first state to ban dynamic pricing in grocery stores. He had proposed the law earlier in 2026.

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Transcript

Marketplace All-in-One Around 02:09 into the episode

Speaker 3

It's gorgeous out there, even though I've been outside all day today.

Stephanie Hughes

…shopper a different price. That price can depend on the weather as well as the time of day and what the store knows about each shopper. This spring, Maryland became the first state to ban this practice in grocery stores. The law was proposed by Governor Moore, and I asked him why he wanted it.

Wes Moore

Because we were seeing how, you know, average Marylanders were just getting hosed by these big corporations. And because what they're using is they're using your data against you. When I walk into a grocery store, they know what time you're coming in. They know what you were buying when you were there. And for many Marylanders, they go to the grocery store at the same time every single week because that's the time that they have to shop for their families. And so what could then happen is they could use the data to where you would pay a different price than the person in front of you because they knew they could increase the price on you and they knew you'd pay for it. And so what we did was we said, that practice is illegal. That cannot happen. That I cannot pay a different price than the person in front of me and the person behind me cannot pay a different price. And so by making it standard, saying like, if this is the price, that is the price. It was, you know, not only did we become the first state in the country that was able to do that. I think we were able to…

Stephanie Hughes

And this is the quick price changes, either through electronic labels or when people are ordering online, they change the price for depending on who you are.

Wes Moore

Depending on who you are, depending on what your buying habits are, because they know that if they increase it by 10%, you're probably just going to pay it. You're probably not going to ask for much. And so that increase on that margin for that supermarket or for that corporation, we just believe…

Stephanie Hughes

Why target grocery stores specifically?

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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