Ben Ray Lujan’s big, dumb idea

There are many bad ideas in Washington, but leave it to New Mexico’s Democrat Sen. Ben Ray Lujan to come up with one of the dumbest. He has co-sponsored the S. 3892 which they are calling the “Stop Price Gouging in Grocery Stores Act of 2026.”

Setting aside for a moment the fact that grocery stores operate on margins of between 1% and 3% and that any “price gouging” would be readily-apparent to shoppers, there are some other “off-the-wall” parts of this bill including the following:

“Stores larger than 10,000 square feet cannot use electronic shelf labels or digital displays for pricing. They must present prices in non-digital formats, such as printed tags.” The idea that Congress should make this a federal law is an affront to federalism (for starters), but what is the point of forcing grocery stores to send a clerk around to manually adjust prices when it can more easily and quickly done by a remote control?

And, while inflation has been high in recent years there have been ups AND downs in terms of pricing of eggs, milk, meat, and numerous other products in recent years. Is Ben Ray Lujan trying to solve a problem or just grandstand?