I was just trying to get something to drink to go along with our dinner.

That's it. The corner store, two minutes from my house. I'm there five, six times a week — juice, snacks, whatever the house needs often with dinner still on the stove, yet to be served. Most items don't have a price sticker on them. That's just corner store culture. You grab what you need, they tell you the price, you pay it. You trust the system because it's always worked well enough. That's the whole arrangement.

But this evening I walked in and noticed something was different. New equipment at the register. A new screen setup I didn't recognize. I looked closer.

BodegaAI.

And just like that, my whole antenna went up.

I need to back up for a second, because context is everything here.

For the past several months I've been doing political communications work in the 40th District (My district and most of what is West Baltimore City). Newsletters, policy content, constituent messaging — trying to find my voice to give my people what they need to hear most so that they can understand who, what, and how their neighborhood is being shaped at the state level.

That work is how I know HB895. The Protection From Predatory Pricing Act. Maryland's new law, just passed April 11th, signed and on its way to taking effect October 1st. It prohibits food retailers and third-party delivery platforms from using your personal data to set the price of your groceries. No charging you more because of who you are, where you live, or what your purchase history says about your income.

Maryland is the first state in the country to pass something like this.

I was proud of that. I wrote about it. I translated it for people who might never read the bill text.

And then I walked into my corner store like any average citizen and saw BodegaAI announcing itself right there at the register, in real time, in the neighborhood the law was written to protect.

Here's what BodegaAI actually does — because I definitely looked it up right after dinner.

It's an AI-powered point-of-sale system built specifically for convenience stores, bodegas, corner stores. And it openly markets itself with dynamic pricing and margin optimization as selling points. Not potential features. Selling points. The system uses ZIP code data to recommend what to stock and — and this is the part — what to charge for it.

ZIP code. As a pricing input.

I need you to understand that ZIP code is one of the oldest proxies in the book for race and income. Researchers have known this for decades. Lenders know it. Insurers know it. Retailers know it. And now the AI that just moved into my corner store in Park Heights knows it too.

Redlining didn't end. It got an algorithm.

Mind you, the owner may not fully understand what they just signed up for. The pitch to small business owners is compelling — give independent stores the same technology advantages as the big chains. Level the playing field. And honestly? I get it. These owners are trying to survive in a market that has never been fair to them either.

But the customers; my neighbors, my community, my kids — are completely in the dark. We're not being asked. We're not consenting. We're just coming in for juice and snacks.

I'm more than just a little frustrated with this.

I've been advocating for digital literacy at the community level. Attempting to create dialogue with residents about technology, data, and what it means for their everyday lives since my first nonprofit role doing census outreach. And the honest truth is that for many, it didn't register as a neighborhood concern. AI felt like a Silicon Valley problem. A future problem. Somebody else's problem.

It was never somebody else's problem.

The technology didn't wait for people to get ready. It showed up in the most trust-dependent retail environment that exists in a low-income neighborhood and the kind of place where you don't comparison shop because there's nowhere else to compare to. It showed up without an announcement, without a consent form, without a community meeting.

And I keep coming back to this question: who else would have noticed?

Not in a self-congratulatory way. I'm genuinely asking. A regular customer isn't going to look up a POS system logo they see at a register. A tech reporter isn't doing their shopping in Park Heights. A policy staffer might know the bill but they're not standing in this particular store at this particular moment making the connection in real time.

I guess this just may be my intersection, and now my responsibility to be the one to point it out.

Living well in Baltimore means knowing what Baltimore is actually becoming, not just the redevelopment and the ribbon cuttings but the new quiet infrastructure being installed in the places where your neighbors buy their groceries and expect to be treated fairly.

HB895 takes effect October 1st. The law is real. The protection is coming. And I'm genuinely proud that Maryland is leading on this — that many politicians in Annapolis were paying attention.

But this we have to sit with: governance catching up is not the same as communities being ready. The law addresses what retailers can do with your data. It does not address whether the person in line behind me at that register has any idea that the machine processing their transaction is learning from it than what it had the capability to do before.

That gap is where the next fight lives. AI adoption has to become a community issue — not a tech issue, not a policy conversation for people in suits. The law caught up. Now we do.