The End of a Fair Price: Dynamic Pricing and the Normalization of Gouging

Lindsay Owens documents how corporations have used personalized pricing to raise prices during inflation, citing a 2022 tweet, a New York Times essay, and a 2025 white paper that found 75% of identical Instacart baskets varied in price across shoppers. Her research prompted an FTC investigation, after which Instacart abandoned the surveillance technology. Owens argues that first-degree price discrimination, not the third-degree models economists defend, enables firms to extract higher profits from price-insensitive customers.