Shopping has always been a battle. Companies work hard to convince you their product is better, while also trying to ensure you pay the highest possible price for your purchase. Now modern technology has changed the game. Companies are now engaging in “surveillance pricing.” Surveillance pricing is when companies put together a profile of you and your shopping habits and then adjust prices specifically for you. Let’s say two people go to Amazon to look at the same television. One person sees a price of $499, while the other sees $599 — for the exact same television, at the exact same moment. The discrepancy is due to their different spending habits and other information that Amazon has gathered about them that tells the company that one person would be willing to spend that extra $100, and the other wouldn’t. Companies create those profiles by gathering information about you from a wide variety of sources — Internet cookies, shopping history, your IP address, and your geographic and demographic information. Even behaviors like how far you scroll when searching for products or what you leave in your shopping cart and never buy contribute to a detailed picture of who you are as a consumer. The simplest way to combat suspected surveillance pricing is to shop around for items at different stores to get a clear idea of what the “normal” price should be. Last year the FTC opened an investigation into surveillance pricing, which could lead to new rules and enforcement to end the practice, but until those become reality, keep your eyes open.
