What they're not telling you: Lin is a Clinical Teaching Fellow at NYU School of Law. Lin is a Clinical Teaching Fellow at NYU School of Law. Before the 1870s, retail goods rarely carried fixed prices.
# THE TAKE: surveillance-pricing-in-grocery-stores.html" title="Maryland becomes first state to ban surveillance pricing in grocery stores" style="color:#1a1a1a;text-decoration:underline;text-decoration-style:dotted;font-weight:500;">surveillance-pricing-exploiting-information-asymmetries.html" title="Surveillance Pricing: Exploiting Information Asymmetries" style="color:#1a1a1a;text-decoration:underline;text-decoration-style:dotted;font-weight:500;">Surveillance Pricing Is Just Monopoly Capitalism With Better Data The outrage over "surveillance pricing" misses the operational reality: this isn't exploitation—it's systematic arbitrage of behavioral prediction. Companies aren't breaking new ethical ground; they're automating discrimination that credit bureaus perfected decades ago. What changes: algorithmic velocity. A retailer watching your browsing history, location patterns, and payment history can now adjust pricing in milliseconds. The infrastructure already existed. Dynamic pricing algorithms are just the transparent version of what mortgage brokers and insurance underwriters have always done—risk-stratify populations invisibly. The actual scandal? Regulatory capture preventing price transparency laws. The EU's demanded disclosure rules—see what *you* paid versus your neighbor—threaten the entire model. That's the real fear. This isn't about stopping surveillance pricing. It's solvable through radical transparency mandates, not corporate virtue signaling. Anything less is theater.
What the Documents Show
Instead, haggling was the norm. Customers and store clerks engaged in a song and dance, testing the other’s economic limits. Then, on the eve of the Philadelphia World’s Fair, businessman John Wanamaker transformed an abandoned railroad station into the Grand Depot , one of the first department stores in the United States. At the grand opening, each item in the sprawling store was affixed with a conspicuous label declaring a non-negotiable price. When millions came to the city for the fair, many had their first encounter with fixed price tags.
Follow the Money
The elimination of haggling saved both customers and clerks time, making the market significantly more efficient. Fair visitors brought the idea of the price tag home with them. Soon, businesses around the world adopted fixed prices and price transparency. One hundred and fifty years later, the datafication of the economy is causing the retail experience to regress to a form of variable pricing far more coercive than the haggling of the past. With online shopping, social media, and data collection, modern corporations have access to more information than ever before. Retailers can view your purchase history, location, personal demographics, and much more.
What Else We Know
This has enabled businesses across a variety of sectors to engage in surveillance pricing—the practice of extracting and exploiting personal information in order to charge customers different prices for the same product or service. Today, variable pricing is back, but this time the seller knows everything about you. The viability of surveillance pricing—its profitability, ubiquity, and exploitative nature—hinges on the presence of market failures. Severe information asymmetries are perhaps the most insidious. While corporations have access to data brokers, online behavioral advertising, and algorithms that can adjust prices in real time, consumers are more disempowered than ever. Surveillance pricing is not new.
Primary Sources
- Source: Hacker News
- Category: Surveillance State
- Cross-reference independently — don't take our word for it.
Disclosure: NewsAnarchist aggregates from public records, API feeds (Federal Register, CourtListener, MuckRock, Hacker News), and independent media. AI-assisted synthesis. Always verify primary sources linked above.