Lindsay Owens, economic sociologist and head of the Groundwork Collaborative, has a thesis that reframes the post-2021 inflation story: rising costs were the match, but corporate pricing infrastructure was the accelerant. Her new book, Gouged: The End of a Fair Price, documents how companies used the cover of inflation to deploy AI pricing tools, data brokers, and algorithmic experimentation on consumers — not as a crisis response, but as a permanent business model shift. The mechanics are specific. Companies like EverSight, Kronos, and Plexure build consumer dossiers containing thousands of data points — age, income, health, religion, partisan affiliation — covering roughly 95% of American adults. Retailers then hire AI pricing consultants who run live experiments on shoppers, personalizing prices to each consumer's individual pain threshold. This isn't dynamic pricing in the airline sense most people understand. It's surveillance pricing: using intimate personal data to calculate exactly how much more each person will tolerate paying. Owens traces a structural shift in corporate strategy. For decades, American capitalism's playbook was cost-side extraction: bust unions, outsource labor, minimize regulatory overhead, keep wages down. Prices stayed low as part of that compact. The shift she documents is toward revenue-side extraction — using technology to maximize what consumers pay rather than minimize what companies spend. The two strategies compound: wages stayed suppressed while prices became algorithmically optimized upward. The political economy is already moving. The FTC is processing roughly 1,000 public comments on surveillance pricing regulation. New York has passed a bill awaiting the governor's signature. Colorado's governor vetoed similar legislation. Wendy's publicly reversed a surge-pricing plan for electronic menu boards after public backlash. Delta and Instacart both retreated from algorithmic pricing experiments after public exposure by Groundwork. These are skirmishes, not a resolution — the underlying infrastructure remains intact and expanding. Owens's proposed "shoppers' bill of rights" targets the machinery directly: ban shared software that enables coordinated pricing, require AI shopping assistants to act in consumer interest rather than steer toward higher prices, and pass privacy protections that would starve data brokers of the raw material they need. The book frames this as a once-in-50-year inflection, arguing the window for structural reform is narrow because the fog of crisis — now compounded by the Iran war's effect on energy prices — gives companies cover to layer genuine cost increases with algorithmic margin expansion. The honest structural problem is concentration. Personalized pricing only works when consumers lack competitive alternatives. Owens notes that comparison shopping has become "almost impossible" — a function of both market consolidation and deliberate information asymmetry. Refund processes have been automated into chatbot labyrinths. The consumer's traditional weapon, walking away to a competitor, requires competitors to exist and prices to be transparent. Both conditions are eroding. The political viability is real but fragile. Owens reports bipartisan interest, including Senate testimony, and polling suggests cost of living has been the top voter concern since 2022. But reform faces the classic problem: the beneficiaries of the current system are concentrated and organized (pricing firms, data brokers, retailers), while the harmed population is diffuse and exhausted. The book's core bet is that public anger has crossed a threshold where a consumer movement can be sustained. Whether that bet pays off depends entirely on whether legislative action materializes before the infrastructure becomes too embedded to dislodge.
