The prices you see online may not be the prices someone else sees. According to consumer advocate Lindsay Owens, that gap is no accident. Over the past ten years, corporations have fundamentally rewritten the rules of pricing, and many shoppers are being deliberately overcharged without ever realizing it.
Owens, who leads the consumer advocacy group Groundwork Collaborative, argues that what looks like ordinary inflation often masks something more calculated. In her new book, "Gouged: The End of a Fair Price—And What That Means for Your Wallet," published in September, she documents the hidden pricing schemes companies use to extract more money from customers, along with practical steps people can take to protect themselves.
"Big Tech is reinventing the rip-off," Owens says. The tactics themselves are not new, she explains—businesses have always looked for ways to charge more. What has changed is the technology available to them. Algorithms, vast data collection, and real-time experimentation have "supercharged" these old tricks, allowing companies to fine-tune prices in ways that were impossible a generation ago.
The most troubling practice, in Owens's view, is personalized pricing. Retailers gather detailed information about individual shoppers—browsing habits, demographic details, and past purchase history—to estimate the maximum amount each person might be willing to pay. Instead of one sticker price for everyone, the same product can carry different price tags depending on who is looking at it.
Hotels, for example, have begun setting room rates based on a customer's geographic location. Airlines use browsing data to help decide how much to charge for a ticket. Grocery stores are testing technology that lets them experiment with how much customers can be charged for everyday items. In each case, the goal is the same: find the highest price a given consumer will accept.
Algorithms make these experiments possible at enormous scale. Rather than testing prices in a single store or market, companies can run continuous, automated trials across millions of users, adjusting offers in real time and learning from the results. Consumers, meanwhile, have no way of knowing they are part of an experiment—or that the person next to them paid less for the same thing.
Owens's advice is not about abandoning online shopping or refusing to travel. Instead, she suggests that consumers can make themselves harder to track, which makes it harder for companies to build the profiles they use to set personalized prices. If a retailer cannot identify you clearly, it has less information to work with when deciding what to charge.
Still, she acknowledges that not every purchase deserves this level of effort. For small, inexpensive items—a pair of shoes, say—the payoff may not be worth the time. The calculus changes for big-ticket expenses. Flights are a prime example, since airfare prices fluctuate constantly and even a modest difference in what you pay can add up quickly.
The broader implication is that pricing has become less transparent than most shoppers assume. When two people search for the same flight, hotel room, or grocery item, they may not be quoted the same amount. The difference is often invisible, buried in data profiles and algorithmic decisions that consumers never see.
This opacity raises difficult questions about fairness. A single, published price allows shoppers to compare offers and make informed choices. Personalized pricing, by contrast, shifts the advantage decisively toward the seller, who knows far more about the buyer than the buyer knows about the pricing system.
Owens's work also highlights how difficult these practices are to detect, let alone challenge. Because prices are set dynamically and can vary by user, there is rarely a clear benchmark to compare against. A traveler who pays more may never learn that a different browser, device, or location would have produced a cheaper fare.
The book arrives at a moment when consumers are already stretched thin by rising costs, making every overcharge more painful. If prices are being quietly inflated on top of broader economic pressures, the cumulative effect on household budgets could be significant—and largely unnoticed.
For consumers, the practical takeaway is that awareness is the first defense. Understanding that personalized pricing exists, and that companies invest heavily in it, changes how you approach your most expensive purchases. Covering your digital trail before booking a flight or reserving a hotel room is a small step that may translate into real savings.
Owens does not claim that any single tactic will defeat these systems. But taken together, the steps she outlines give shoppers a better chance of paying something closer to a fair price—rather than whatever an algorithm has decided they can be persuaded to hand over. In a marketplace where the price tag is increasingly personal, that knowledge may be the most valuable tool of all.
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