For at least a century, a well-established principle has held sway in commerce: You can’t discriminate against customers in your pricing. Everybody pays the same price for your product. You can offer a volume or ‘last-minute’ discount, of course, but that discount has to be available to anyone who buys that volume of your product at that time.
As our economy’s accelerating collapse is pushing more and more people into financial precarity, an exception to this principle has been introduced: ‘sliding scale’ or ‘pay what you can afford’ pricing. The idea of this is to make your product or service available to more people.
But increasing scarcities and soaring inequality, along with new technologies, are also allowing unscrupulous corporations and individuals to ‘rig’ markets to exploit the urgent demand for items in short supply. The obvious example of this is ticket scalping by bulk buyers (and now bots) that buy up far more of a scarce item than they want, and then resell the excess at a huge, completely unearned profit.
Likewise, bidding wars are now cropping up in all kinds of different places: Real estate agents use them to drive up prices of scarce properties for personal profit. ‘Auctions’ have gone from being a mechanism to find appropriate ‘market’ price levels for goods that have no easily-determinable value, to a method for corporations to gouge customers, most notoriously the online ‘auctions’ for premium seats on airlines, a disgusting practice that pits customers against each other for deliberately-limited offerings.
The stock market, the real estate market, currency and commodity markets, rare art markets, ‘luxury’ goods markets, and ‘hedging’ and ‘futures’ markets, are now all increasingly volatile (and wildly overvalued), as the few obscenely rich people and corporations have perverted them all into wildly speculative casinos, and openly employ ‘pump and dump’ schemes and other corrupt practices, now that the possibility of genuine appreciation of long-term value in a collapsing economy has effectively dropped to zero.
If all that wasn’t bad enough, the introduction of AI is encouraging and enabling a vastly larger-scale abuse that completely shreds the ‘one-fair-price’ principle. Led by Google and Apple and other giant tech bro corporations, those who have been mining and selling your personal information to other mostly unprincipled and corrupt vendors and scam artists, are now planning on making what is variously called ‘predatory pricing’, ‘personalized pricing’, ‘algorithmic pricing’, or ‘surveillance pricing’ to be the prevailing, universal pricing mechanism for everything you buy, weaponizing your personal information against you.
The way this works is that, as soon as you go to a store or a website, the Google Gangsters will send (for a fee) a slew of information about you and your current situation that will enable the vendor to instantly assess and ‘personally’ price everything in their ‘store’ to be the absolute maximum price they know they can charge you that you won’t, or can’t, walk away from. That might be ten times what the guy next to you in line just paid for the same item. This price will be adjusted based on:
- How much you earn, what your credit rating is, when you last received a paycheque, how much debt you’re carrying, and otherwise how much you can afford to pay.
- How desperate you are, given the immediate circumstances in your geographical area (weather or natural disaster, need a hotel room or rental car in a faraway city tonight, need medicines or a medical device, need the next flight to see sick family members).
- What your alternatives are (how far would you have to travel to get the same or similar item ‘in stock’ elsewhere).
- Your ability and willingness to look for alternatives (time of day, your health, geographic location, amount of work to ‘shop around’).
- Your past buying habits (how and when you buy what kinds of things, and from whom).
- What your competitors are charging (price-fixing in real time).
This ‘personalized pricing’ isn’t even limited to consumer purchases. It can enable oligopolies and cartels to ‘coordinate’ (fix) wholesale prices, prices that just flow through the retailer and are passed along to you. It can enable employers in an industry, especially a tightly-controlled one, to ‘coordinate’ (fix) employee wages and share information about individual employees’ behaviours and financial situations. (This is often done through industry ‘information aggregators’ — aka ‘price clearinghouses’ or ‘accountability sinks’ — to smokescreen the obvious privacy violations.)
As Matt Stoller explains:
Google [is launching] a new Gemini-powered ad service and open protocol to create personalized surveillance pricing for merchants across the economy. It is, as Google VP Vidhya Srinivasan said, a way to “offer custom deals to specific shoppers who are ready to buy, without having to extend the same thing to everybody.” Partners include Walmart, Visa, Mastercard, Shopify, Gap, Kroger, Macy’s, Stripe, Home Depot, Lowes, American Express, etc… CEO Sundar Pichai said the company will sell not only marketing, but price coordinating services. In the documentation for the universal commerce protocol, google lists “dynamic pricing” as a key tool for merchants. And Kroger, a partner of Google, already announced it will deploy Gemini, enriched with its own proprietary data, to do consumer pricing.
So, essentially, the Google Gangsters and data brokers are planning to use information they have extracted from you to maximize the price their corporate customers can get away with charging you for everything you buy, and to minimize what employers can get away with paying you.
The ‘opportunities’ for this new corporate crime are unlimited: Banks could minimize what they pay you on deposits and maximize what they charge you on loans, changing rates on a daily basis depending on what they can get away with as your personal financial situation changes. Chain restaurants could (and Cory says this is now in the works) ‘personalize’ the price for your meal as you drive up to the pickup window. Landlords could maximize the rent they can charge you based on your personal ‘ability to pay’, and coordinate with other landlords to lock you in. This can be employed in just about any industry you can imagine.
And of course all this information will be openly shared with your suppliers’ and employers’ competitors via ‘information aggregators’, so you won’t get any better deal changing suppliers or employers.
It would be easy to chalk this all up to corporate malfeasance (and it’s certainly that). But what is driving this imperative is that each of the ‘players’ in our collapsing economy (declining resources, stagnant production, crumbling infrastructure, massive deregulation, increasing monopolies and oligopolies, increasing population) is searching more and more desperately for ways to continue to tread water and make a profit when everything around them is falling apart.
This is just one more glaring sign that there is no longer enough to go around, and soon there will be even less, so we will have to increasingly squeeze everyone else to have enough for our own needs and comfort.
It’s not going to end well.
image by AI; my own prompt
