Consumer Pricing Investigations finds ‘Surveillance pricing’ is being expanded in America
“Could you be paying more for a product than the person right next to you? It's called personalized or surveillance pricing”
Walmart filed highly technical patents showing AI technology is going to be used to set prices
“Investigation into so-called surveillance or personalized pricing — Companies know there's money to be made by surveilling us, by learning things about us that point to the highest price we're willing to pay.
In our test on a Walmart TV, one of our Atlanta price checkers, JP, was given a price over $1,000 while the rest of us were all under $900 — Still to this day, we're inches away from each other, and apparently that's enough for a price difference of $100+”
There are documented cases for each of these companies proving they are already using this surveillance pricing
Target: Settled a California case for about $5 million after its app raised prices when shoppers were geofenced near a store. One reported example was a TV jumping from about $500 to about $600 in the parking lot
Instacart: 2025 Consumer Reports test found identical items at the same store at the same time priced differently for different shoppers, as much as 23%
Kroger: Uses loyalty data arm to profile tens of millions of shoppers, including income estimates and give different prices for promotions
Uber and Lyft: Algorithmic fares that differ for the same trip at the same time
Delta: Uses AI pricing system on a share of domestic flights with plans to expand
Tinder: Charged older users substantially more for the same subscription
Orbitz: Mac users were steered toward higher priced hotels than PC users
Staples: Wall Street Journal testing found higher online prices for the same item when the shopper was farther from a competitor store
The Princeton Review: Online prices varied by ZIP code, with higher prices in areas with larger Asian populations
Amazon: Also has been caught but said they stopped…
JetBlue: Facing a lawsuit alleging surveillance pricing