A North Texas police officer just dropped a transparency bomb on the grocery industry. The implications are seismic.
Published July 11, 2025
By Chris Walton
While everyone was distracted by Prime Day festivities this past week, something far more consequential quietly launched in Dallas-Fort Worth that should have every grocery executive losing sleep.
Grocery Dealz launched last month as a grocery e-commerce marketplace that allows consumers to compare prices in real time between grocery stores. The free app enables shoppers to compare grocers’ prices and then quickly build a cart, with users able to build the cart in-app and then be directed to the selected grocer’s app or website with the cart already made.
If you think this sounds like just another savings app, you’re missing the forest for the trees. This could signal the beginning of the end of price opacity in grocery retail.
The good: Perfect information finally arrives
According to USDA Economic Research, “From 2020 to 2024, the all-food Consumer Price Index (CPI) rose 23.6 percent, a higher increase than the all-items CPI, which grew 21.2 percent over the same period.” Against this brutal backdrop, Grocer Dealz CEO and Dallas police officer Michael Waldroup calls his creation “the Gas Buddy of the grocery industry,” and he’s not wrong.
But here’s what makes Grocery Dealz different from every coupon app that’s come before: While Grocery Dealz is working to partner with as many grocery players as possible, grocers don’t need to be partnered with the app for their prices to be included as the company’s price data comes from a third party.
Read that again. This isn’t about voluntary participation. This is about forcing the entire industry into a transparency they never asked for.
The execution is surprisingly sophisticated. Users set a custom shopping radius, build their cart, hit “Compare Now” and — as Waldroup puts it — “Our formulas do the magic behind the scenes. It shows the user what the total balance is and the itemized breakdowns of every single retailer.”
What economists have been promising us for decades is almost here — the democratization of information at scale.
The bad: The loyalty charade is ending
Here’s where things start to get uncomfortable though. As Waldroup notes, “Often consumers habitually go to their most familiar or convenient grocery store not knowing that they could be saving hundreds or thousands of dollars a year by switching to another nearby store.”
For years, grocers have built business models around convenience, loyalty programs, and what behavioral economists call “choice architecture” — essentially making it hard enough to compare prices that most people don’t even try. Grocery Dealz obliterates this competitive moat overnight.
You can see exactly how all this will play out. Put eggs, milk, and ground beef in your cart, and suddenly you’re staring at the uncomfortable truth of just how much more you’ve been paying for the convenience of shopping at your “preferred” store.
The challenge for traditional grocers then becomes more than just price competition — they are now competing with an app that makes shopping behavior data-driven in ways that change the customer relationship. When shoppers can see in real-time that their weekly cart costs $127 at Store A versus $97 at Store B, loyalty potentially becomes a luxury most families can’t afford.
The ugly: Agentic AI will finish what this started
But here’s the real Nightmare on Elm Street that should really keep grocery executives awake at night: This isn’t just about Grocery Dealz. This is even more about what comes next.
Agentic AI is coming fast and furiously. We all know that. And you can envision a world where AI agents will be able to coordinate orders from different grocers based on price, which means e-commerce could become unsustainable for many players in the grocery space if that is the case, because many grocers simply don’t have the margin structure to move lower than where they currently are.
Think about it: When AI agents can automatically source your milk from Kroger, your meat from Costco, and your produce from Whole Foods — all based on real-time pricing and delivered to your door — what happens to the traditional grocery store model?
Grocery Dealz plans to expand next to Austin-San Antonio, then Houston, with statewide expansion across Texas, followed by regional and ultimately national growth. Along with entering other regions, applying coupons and other discounts will be the next piece of the puzzle for Grocery Dealz, with plans to “auto-apply coupons to shopping lists.”
With Amazon and Walmart jumping feet first into the deep end of the agentic AI pool, Grocery Dealz may not be the ultimate winner here but you can bet your bottom dollar that Grocery Dealz is the first domino to fall in what ultimately will be incredibly disruptive to the grocery industry.
What this means for retail’s future
As I step back, the whole situation reminds me of the anecdote of Walmart CEO Doug McMillon carrying around the photo on his phone of the top 10 retailers by decade because this is going to upend that list big time. The retailers that should be quaking in their boots inside of that list are Kroger and Albertsons (currently ranked #4 and #10, according to NRF), particularly because they play the high-low game, while others like Walmart and Amazon already have a strong low price reputation in the space and thus, given their concurrent investment in agentic AI, stand to grow share ever more in the long-term just through the inertia of generational technological change.
They’re the ones already investing in and putting resources toward agentic AI functionality on their websites to capitalize on this in the long run. Walmart’s Sparky integration and Amazon’s marketplace approach, both here and particularly in the UK, highlight how they are each prepping the table for a world where perfect price information is table stakes.
For legacy grocers still playing the loyalty card game and banking on the existing strength of their net promoter scores, this is your wake-up call. As Waldroup puts it, “We look at this as a marketplace. So if you’re not in the marketplace, you’re going to lose 100% of the time.”
The question isn’t whether more apps like Grocery Dealz will emerge — it’s whether traditional retailers will adapt to a world where customers have perfect information, or whether they’ll become casualties of their own outdated business models as AI pushes their leaders to the limits of their neuroplasticity.
The revolution isn’t coming — it’s already here. And, surprisingly, the first revolutionary isn’t some Silicon Valley unicorn. It’s a North Texas police officer who understands that transparency is the ultimate customer service.
Ready or not, perfect price transparency has arrived. Who will adapt and survive remains to be seen. And it isn’t like grocers don’t have enough on their plates already.
About the Author
Chris WaltonChris Walton is the Co-CEO of Omni Talk and the former Vice President of Target’s Store of the Future project. He is recognized as one of the top retail experts globally, with deep insights into innovation, digital transformation, and modern commerce strategies.
Omni Talk® is the retail blog for retailers, written by retailers. Chris Walton and Anne Mezzenga founded Omni Talk® in 2017 and have quickly turned it into one of the fastest growing blogs in retail.