Walmart CEO Moves To Head Off Progressive Groundwork Collaborative Pushes For Shoppers’ Bill Of Rights

Proposed Shoppers’ Bill Of Rights

Groundwork Collaborative positions the proposed Shoppers’ Bill of Rights as a way to protect consumers from “hidden fees, pricing games and corporate tactics that make everyday life more expensive.”

It cites a survey conducted by political polling firm Blue Rose Research among 3,250 likely 2026 voters which found 66% support the bill and want Congress to “establish a basic set of rules that businesses must follow when they sell to the public—including honest prices, easy cancellations, timely refunds and clear product information.”

The 12 planks were tested in an early September online survey. However, it was not conducted as a standard public-opinion poll. Rather, it was partisan-primed and loaded: each item was presented with a partisan-framed introduction, a neutral description, opposing arguments attributed to Democrats and Republicans, and a forced-choice question asking respondents which party they agree with more. Blue Rose states this structure counters acquiescence bias and reveals which policies defy party alignment.

Notably, the firm does not reveal the party affiliation of the survey sample, making it impossible to assess how such partisan alignment may have influenced the results. Even more noteworthy, Blue Rose is not a politically neutral research firm. Its corporate mission states, “Blue Rose symbolizes turning blue what is now red,” signaling an explicitly Democrat bias that shapes its testing framework and its conclusions.

With those caveats understood, the Shoppers’ Bill of Rights contains the following 12 planks in order of agreement:

• Right to Cancellation—73% agree companies should be required to make canceling a subscription as easy as signing up for one.
• Right to a Refund—69% want companies to be required to provide refunds to consumers in their original form of payment and send that refund in a set number of days when a purchase is canceled, never delivered or does not work as advertised. It would also ban restocking and arbitrary refund fees.
• Right to an All-In Price—68% agree businesses should be required to show the full, final price of a product upfront, including any mandatory fees above the advertised price.
• Right to Proper Billing—68% want laws that set a deadline for sending bills within a set period of time after services are rendered.
• Right to a Fair Price—68% believe surveillance pricing should be banned and companies prohibited from using customers’ personal data to charge a different price to what others pay.
• Right to Comparison Shop—65% say stores should be required to display unit prices in a standard unit, such as price per ounce or pound, on shelf labels and online listing so customers can compare prices of products in different sizes.
• Right to a Predictable Price—64% want laws to limit dynamic pricing so that companies are prohibited from raising the price of a product in “real time” based on demand, such as concert or sports tickets when only a few seats are left or for ride-share fares during busy times.
• Right to Resale—63% want protection for a customer’s right to resell what they buy. This would make it illegal for companies to prohibit customers from reselling, lending or giving away products they have paid for, including digital purchase like e-books, games and movies.
• Right to Repair—62% believe customers should be guaranteed the right to repair products they buy with manufacturers of cars, phones, appliances and other like products required to sell parts, tools and repair manuals to fix those products.
• Right to a Level Playing Field—59% want the Federal Trade Commission to enforce existing law that prohibits wholesale suppliers from giving large national retailers better prices for goods than small businesses. It notes that the Robinson-Patman Act that banned such practices has gone unenforced since the 1980s.
• Right to a Competitive Price—57% want a ban on what it calls “algorithmic price fixing,” such that competing companies use shared pricing software to set prices. Examples of such common pricing software include RealPage used by landlords and Kalibrate for setting gasoline prices at gas stations.
• Right to Your Own Agent—57% agree that chatbots and other AI tools should be required to act in the customer’s interest, so that they recommend the best option for the customer, rather than directing them to products the AI company is paid to promote.

Groundwork Collaborative argues the time is now to revise consumer protection laws because existing laws and regulations have not kept pace with technological advancement.

“Companies are deploying a dizzying array of tricks and tactics to reinvent the ripoff and squeeze American consumers,” CEO Lindsay Owens declared. “Policymakers should put simple guardrails in place to protect consumers from the high-tech ways corporations are gouging us.”

Unintended Consequences

Groundwork frames these proposals as overdue guardrails for a marketplace where technology has overrun established consumer-protection laws. But as well-intentioned as the Shoppers’ Bill of Rights is, it carries risks that retailers can’t afford to ignore— not least of which is the potential for draconian laws and regulations that could disrupt the normal course of business.

George Mason University law professor John M. Yun says the proposal targets many business practices that have already sparked significant policy debate. The challenge, he argues, are that the bill bundles fundamentally different issues.

“The difficulty is that the litany of ‘rights’ is combining a lot of very different practices,” he said, noting that disclosure mandates in several planks are “very different from price controls, which are very different from a proactive duty to use AI only to help consumers.”

Yun, also an economist specializing in antitrust, law and economics, and law and technology, has examined personalized prices in a recent paper published in the CPI Antitrust Chronicle. He found that normal market dynamics “mitigate concern that personalized pricing will grow.”

Companies that avoid personalized pricing—like Walmart—will gain a competitive advantage over those that adopt it. And firms that engage in personalized pricing “will likely be stigmatized in the market, which creates a strong disincentive to widely adopt the practice,” he wrote.

Marketing professor Dubé said the bill begins to falter on its call for “fair” and “predictable” pricing—two terms that are undefined, subjective and potentially misleading.

On “fair,” he notes that a single common price is not inherently equitable if it excludes disadvantaged consumers from accessing certain goods and services. In some cases, he suggests, differential or progressive pricing could be more fair by broadening access. Colorado’s governor recently vetoed a far-reaching algorithmic and surveillance-pricing bill for this reason, observing it could prevent lower-income shoppers from receiving discounts.

Dubé also challenges the assumption that algorithmic pricing only pushes prices higher—algorithms can be used to lower prices as well. Normal demand dynamics and market stigma already act as natural checks on personalized pricing, he argues. And he adds that some concerns in the bill are fundamentally privacy, not pricing issues and should be treated as such.

“Parts of this bill will no-doubt appeal in a populist way to people who do not understand the underlying economics,” he shared. “But there a real risk that some of these criteria would ban marketing practices that benefit many of us.”

Retailers Must Act Now Or Face Regulation Later

In the end, Groundwork Collaborative has done retailers a favor by articulating the consumer protection issues that are rising to the surface as technology advances. And unlike government, which tends to regulate with one-size-fits-all rules that can cripple small businesses, impose heavy compliance costs on large ones and hinder innovation across the board, businesses are far better equipped to address these concerns in real time—just as Walmart has done by transparently explaining its EDLP pricing principles and building consumer trust in the process. Retailers that follow suit can offset the disruption that would come if Washington steps in to do it for them.

See Also:

ForbesWalmart Bets On Digital Price Tags. Shoppers May Fear Surge Pricing.By Roger DooleyForbesAlgorithmic And Surveillance Pricing Pushes Retail Into Legal MinefieldBy Pamela N. DanzigerForbesRetailers Must Separate ESLs From Surveillance Pricing As Federal Pressure MountsBy Pamela N. Danziger