Skip NavigationVasil Dimitrov | E+ | Getty Images
Shopping should not be both increasingly expensive and increasingly exhausting.
I’ve worked as an economic sociologist and consumer advocate for over a decade and helped craft policies on Capitol Hill to protect American shoppers. I’m currently the president and CEO of Groundwork Collaborative, a think tank and advocacy group focused on making the economy more accessible to everyone.
In my new book, “Gouged: The End of a Fair Price — and What That Means for Your Wallet,” I delve into unfair practices like surveillance pricing — essentially when companies offer you and your friend, for example, two different prices for the same product based on your personal information.
I believe, from the bottom of my heart, that it’s not the job of the consumer alone to try to beat the machine. Battling the pricing bots isn’t the future that I want for us. But I think it is time to update our rules for an age of e-commerce, agentic commerce and shopping that is increasingly assisted by artificial intelligence.
Many of the tips I suggest in my book might save you money, but they will eat up another different valuable resource: your time. With all that in mind, this is my best advice — and strategies that I personally use — for anyone who wants to get better and fairer prices when shopping online.
Uncover the hidden ways to comparison shop
It used to be that to compare the products you wanted to buy, you would look at similar stores and see what the better price point was. That’s not enough anymore. There are more ways to comparison shop than you might think, and a lot of them are hiding in plain sight.
Think of any way you could possibly buy something online. Even for the same company, it’s likely that the price is going to be different based on how you access it.
What are you being charged at the brick-and-mortar store versus the website versus the app? Are you logged in or logged out? How much is the item when you search on an iPhone versus an Android phone versus a laptop? How much is it when you ask a chatbot to get it for you? All of these are now sources of pricing variation.
You also might consider using a virtual private network or going into incognito mode as well. Comparison shopping more exhaustively can be just that, exhausting. But it is one of my chief recommendations if you want to be as sure as you can that you are getting the best price, even from the same store.
Turn the experiment back around on companies
Some companies experiment on you to figure out how much they can charge you. So my advice is to flip it and reverse it.
Before you buy Thanksgiving airline tickets, sit down with your spouse and see if one of you gets the better deal. If you’re at a concert with friends, before you book a car to go home, all three of you should fire up the same rideshare app and see if one of you gets the lower price.
You may see prices and fees vary across people, even for the same item at the same time, or the same ride to the same destination.
My organization, Groundwork Collaborative, has conducted and collaborated on investigations that bear this out. We recently ran an experiment with NBC’s “TODAY.” We asked folks in the studio to open StubHub and buy the same Harry Styles concert tickets at Madison Square Garden. Fees varied across the participants.
In a statement, a spokesperson from StubHub said, “We use randomized, anonymous tests to find which discounts best balance demand and access. These pricing tests don’t use data like demographics, location or purchase history.”
Experimentation is really important and it’s one of the key ways that we can fight back against these practices.
Use your voice to bring power back to the consumer
In “Gouged,” I outline what I call a Shoppers’ Bill of Rights, a comprehensive set of local, state and federal policy solutions to level the playing field between retailers and shoppers. We’re not there yet, but there is a lot you can do right now to help bring some of the power back to consumers.
When you call your local lawmakers, you can say something to the effect of: “I know that there are a lot of reasons prices are high right now, and I know that you don’t have a lot of control over many of them. But you can work to ban surveillance pricing, the practice of spying on you to overcharge you. You can work to eliminate junk fees and require companies to show you the full price of something up front. You can work to ensure that I can get a refund on the same card I bought the item on — without fighting a chatbot for three hours. You can help me cancel my subscriptions by making companies offer simple ways to get out of stuff.”
Those are all things in the Shoppers’ Bill of Rights that lawmakers can take on. And those seemingly small changes could help Americans get fairer prices.
So don’t be afraid to use your own platform. If you are trying to buy something and see four different prices on four different platforms for the same store, call it out. At a minimum, post about it. I think that consumers raising their voices is an important way that we start the work of consumer advocacy and bring attention to these issues. Companies will often respond if they are worried about losing market share.
At the same time, when you do run into issues, it’s important to report what you experience to local officials, whether that is an attorney general or someone involved at the state level in consumer protections.
On social media, you can certainly talk about companies that are engaging in these unfair practices, but you can also highlight the ones that are committing to go in a different direction. Shout out your favorite small business that isn’t using algorithmic pricing. One of the best things you can do is support indie businesses and shop local whenever you can.
Lindsay Owens is president and CEO of Groundwork Collaborative. She is the author of “Gouged: The End of a Fair Price — and What That Means for Your Wallet” (Viking) and the Gouged newsletter.
