The Seattle Mayor’s Office is moving an ordinance through City Council that would reshape how grocers and retailers offer everyday savings, and the timeline leaves little room to get it right. Washington Retail Association (WR) and other stakeholders have been at the table throughout. We submitted detailed feedback and specific amendment language to protect the coupons, discounts, and loyalty programs Seattle families depend on. The current draft reflects very little of it.
WR Supports the Goal
Our position has not changed. A business should not be able to use your personal data to charge you a higher price, and that should be law. During the 2026 session, grocers, retailers, labor, and consumer advocates came close to a consensus proposal before time ran out. That framework protected consumers and preserved the savings tools they rely on.
Seattle’s ordinance takes a much broader approach. It reaches the discount programs themselves, and there is little evidence that brick-and-mortar grocers here are doing what it targets.
Three Ways Savings Are Exposed
- Loyalty programs face conditions that cannot all be met. The exclusion meant to protect them permits discounts built from purchase-history “tiers,” then prohibits use of that same data to “make inferences about the consumer.” Sorting customers into tiers based on what they bought is an inference. An ordinary loyalty program cannot satisfy both requirements at once.
- Personalized offers may not be permitted at all. The ordinance allows purchase-history discounts only when they are based on tiers “rather than individualized prices.” That puts the targeted digital coupon a shopper clips in a store app into question.
- Even a compliant program can be narrowed later. The Director may issue rules “including rules providing for additional restrictions on the use of prior purchase history and permissible tiers.” A retailer could build a program that complies on day one and then watch the standard move by rule. There is no stated floor, and no good-faith reliance defense anywhere in the ordinance.
It’s worth noting that loyalty programs are entirely voluntary. No one is enrolled without their knowledge. A shopper chooses to sign up, decides whether to use the app, can opt out at any time, and can take their business to a competitor across the street. That is a meaningful distinction from the conduct this ordinance is meant to address, which is using data a consumer never knowingly shared to charge that person more. The City’s own findings describe protecting consumers from “data collection without their knowledge.” A program someone knowingly joins, uses on their own terms, and can leave whenever they like is not that.
Why Legal Risk Alone Can End a Program
Even where a discount might qualify, the enforcement structure makes offering it hazardous. “Aggrieved party” includes anyone suffering “tangible or intangible harm.” Any person or class may sue. There is no requirement that a customer paid more, no pre-suit notice, no chance to cure a good-faith error, and no good-faith reliance defense. A recordkeeping gap by itself is presumed to be a violation.
We have seen how this plays out. Statutes built this way, where each instance is a separate violation and no actual harm is required, reliably generate litigation that has little to do with real consumer harm. Washington has fixed two such laws in as many years. The Equal Pay and Opportunities Act drew over 100 class actions from a handful of serial plaintiffs before the 2025 Legislature added notice-and-cure. The Commercial Electronic Mail Act is a sharper example. For 27 years it produced roughly eight retail cases total. Then a 2025 State Supreme Court ruling let claims proceed on an email subject line alone. Retailers were hit with more than 100 suits in twelve months, and the count passed 200 before lawmakers acted. A law that had generated about one lawsuit every three years started generating 2-3 a week.
Contradictory rules are one problem. Lawsuits untethered from any actual harm or wrongdoing are another. Put them together and many retailers may simplify or drop a program rather than risk it. That is how discounts disappear. Not because anyone set out to ban them, but because offering them became too risky.
The Families with the Most to Lose
Seattle’s own Race and Social Justice Initiative found that Southeast Seattle averaged 26.5% food insecurity between 2018 and 2020, with Black and Hispanic/Latinx households twice as likely to be food insecure as white households. In Southeast King County, one in four people are food insecure.
For those families, a coupon is not a convenience. Washington’s state-funded WAFOOD survey found that shopping for lower prices is how households manage rising food costs more than any other strategy. Stand in a Seattle checkout line and look at the ten people around you. About seven got there chasing a lower price. More Washington households stretch the budget by hunting for deals than by cutting back on how much they eat.
Seattle also knows what grocery loss looks like. Kroger closed six Puget Sound stores last year, including Lake City’s Fred Meyer, citing “a steady rise in theft and a challenging regulatory environment that adds significant costs.” More than 700 workers were affected, and the Council declared a public health emergency in response.
An ordinance meant to improve affordability should not make it legally risky to offer the savings these households count on.
What You Can Do
We are not asking the Council to abandon this effort. We are asking for the time and the amendments to protect these programs, and operator voices are what the Council needs to hear.
- Review the ordinance with your team and identify how it would affect your coupons, discounts, and loyalty offerings.
- Contact your council members directly about how this ordinance could affect you and your customers.
- Submit written comment before the tentative August 21 briefing and send WR concrete examples of programs at risk.
We have amended the language that protects these programs without touching the ordinance’s goal of stopping algorithmic price increases. Member voices over the next two weeks will make the difference.
Contact Crystal Leatherman, Director of Policy and Government Affairs, at [email protected] to share how this would affect your customers.
