California Voted to Ban Charging Two Customers Different Prices. Check Your Own Software.

California's legislature worked until almost midnight Monday night and then went home for the year. On the way out they passed 26 AI related bills. Two are already signed, and the other 24 are sitting on Gavin Newsom's desk right now. He's got until September 30 to sign them or veto them.

I know. California. You're in Ohio. Here's why I'm writing about it anyway.

The software you run your business on doesn't get built twice. Your booking system, your online store, your email platform, none of those companies are going to maintain a California version and an Ohio version of the same product. They look at the strictest rule they have to follow and they ship that to everybody. So when California passes something, you usually get it too, about six months later, buried in a release note nobody opens.

The one that actually touches a small shop

Out of the 26, the one I'd go look at is AB 2564. It bans surveillance pricing, which is when a company uses what it knows about you personally to decide what you get charged. Your browsing history, where you're standing right now, what device you're on, what the system has guessed about your income. Same product, two customers, two prices.

Most people hear that and picture an airline or Amazon. Fair enough. But I've sat in front of enough small business dashboards to tell you that plenty of small shops are doing a version of this without ever deciding to. It's baked into the tools. Your online store has a setting for dynamic pricing. Your booking software offers to show a different rate to somebody who's hit your site three times this week. Your abandoned cart email sends 15 percent off to the people the system flagged as price sensitive and full price to everybody else.

Nobody sat down and chose that. Somebody clicked yes on a feature that promised more revenue and never thought about it again.

The check

Pull up whatever handles your pricing and go looking for anything called personalized pricing, dynamic pricing, smart discounts, or a customer segment that's tied to a price. Then ask one thing about each one you find: if a customer sat down across from me and asked why they paid more than their neighbor, could I explain it without wincing?

Loyalty discounts pass that test easy. Group rates, senior rates, a student rate, a coupon anybody in town can go grab, all fine, and the California bill carves those out on purpose. What doesn't pass is a price that moved because software decided this particular person would probably pay it.

I've had this exact conversation with an owner who had no idea his platform was doing it. He wasn't running a scam. He turned on a feature two years ago because a rep told him it would lift his average order value, and it did, and that was the end of him thinking about it.

Why the deadline matters more than the law

Newsom has until September 30 and I have no idea which way he'll go. Doesn't really matter for you. The vendors have already read the bill and they're already deciding what to change, because the last thing a software company wants is to be the reason its customers get sued in California.

You're not going to get a letter about this. You're going to get an update. A setting you've been quietly using is going to work differently one Tuesday, or go away, and if you don't know it was on you won't know it's gone. Fifteen minutes in your own settings this week is a lot cheaper than finding out through a customer who noticed first.