Shop for ANYTHING on line, as it’s primarily being used for bigger ticket items rather than groceries. But it’s moving into the grocery space, too. Instacart grocery shopping was in the NYT today:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/09/...gorithmic-pricing.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share
And, it’s been happening for quite awhile now.
“Imagine this: a family member has died, and attending their funeral is very important to you. Somehow — you don’t know how — the airlines know this about you, so when you go to buy a ticket they jack up their prices, forcing you to pay more for the same flight than other people.
This is an example of what’s being called “surveillance pricing” — basically, using data and knowledge about consumers to treat us differently from other customers and squeeze more money out of us… If these strategies are allowed to succeed, it’s likely that companies will adopt them not just in aviation but across a variety of markets, from telecommunications to grocery stores.
Privacy advocates have long warned of related uses of personal data including targeted advertising,
pricediscrimination, consumer disempowerment, profiling, and
digital redlining. In 2012 it was not a new concept when I
wrote that “big data”
accentuates the information asymmetries of big companies over other economic actors and allows for people to be manipulated. If a store can gain insight into just how badly I want to buy something, just how much I can afford to pay for it, just how knowledgeable I am about the marketplace, or the best way to scare me into buying it, it can extract the maximum profit from me.
Later that same year,
an investigation by the
Wall Street Journal found that prices quoted by online retailers like Staples and Home Depot changed based on who the customer was — with people living in higher-income areas generally getting the best deals.
But today, the threat is being talked about — and actualized — more than ever. The president of Delta Airlines told an investor conference in December that his
company was planning “a full reengineering of how we price,” that the company’s technology could
determine “the amount people are willing to pay for the premium products related to the base fares,” and that eventually, “we will have a price that’s available on that flight, on that time, to you, the individual.”
