Businessweek Feature Examines Owens’ Impact as an Economic Expert & Political Influencer Holding the C-Suite Accountable
Today, Lindsay Owens, President and CEO of Groundwork Collaborative, was profiled in Bloomberg Businessweek for her leadership as an economic expert, consumer advocate, and corporate watchdog holding the C-suite accountable. The feature follows the release of her new book Gouged: The End of a Fair Price–and What That Means for Your Wallet. You can read the full feature here.
In the piece, Bloomberg Businessweek columnist Max Chafkin spotlights Owens’ career-long commitment to calling out how corporate greed and deceptive tactics drive up costs and squeeze working families. “For 150 years it has been the norm that if you and I were standing in line together, we would pay the same price,” Owens says in the feature. “But that’s just not true anymore. Even though some of it is legal, it feels deeply unfair.”
Owens has spent years at the forefront of the debate on inflation, affordability, and corporate power, investigating how large corporations – like Instacart, McDonalds, and Amazon – have “reinvented the rip-off.” The feature follows Owens’ career from PhD student, calling out the harms of predatory mortgages, to a Senior Economic Policy Adviser to Senator Elizabeth Warren, to Chief Executive of Groundwork, leading its groundbreaking work to expose the hidden forces in the economy that harm average Americans. As Chafkin lays out, Owens’ work has had impact at the highest levels of government and in the boardrooms of America’s largest corporations. “There’s no one in the country who has done more effective work on pricing,” says Senator Elizabeth Warren in the feature. “Lindsay is the person with the time, the training and the resources to make these C-suite guys sweat.”
This week, Owens turned up the heat on one of the country’s most powerful corporations, exposing Walmart executives’ doublespeak on the retailers’ capability to deploy personalized pricing by revealing the company’s arsenal of active and pending patents on technology to set prices based on customers’ data. After conducting thorough research into more than 300 patents, she describes Walmart as “a company that is hell-bent on trying to make sure you pay the absolute most for each item in your cart.”
In the Bloomberg feature, Chafkin writes that Owens warns that anyone dismissing the anger of Americans feeling ripped off is out of touch. “The biggest political risk you can take right now is more incrementalism,” she says. “Everybody but a certain subset of elites has moved to populism.”
He previews Owens’ next move: working with the next Congress to investigate the billionaires and corporations who are using money and influence to profit off the backs of ordinary Americans. “It’d be good for Democrats to show the American people that they’re not entirely captured by corporate America,” Owens says. “That’d be the smallest possible thing we could achieve.”
Chafkin closes the piece by pointing out, “The comment sounds like a lament from a frustrated political outsider, but it’s also a warning. Owens and her fellow economic populists aren’t on the fringe anymore. The day after she talked about jail time for CEOs, she also taped a Today show segment about the prices of concert tickets. Polls suggest that Democrats are likely to retake the House and possibly the Senate. If they do, executives who once did ‘the inflation dance’ may want to find some new moves.”
MORE FROM OWENS:
On Morning Joe: “They’re trying to assess your willingness to pay, and this combines two things that Americans absolutely hate, understandably: being spied on and being ripped off. But this is no longer about the cost of making a good or bringing a good to market. This is about a new corporate credo. The right price is the one that they can get you to fork over.”
On the TODAY Show: “It seemed to me that price hikes were not random anymore, they started to feel rigged … This is coming for every line item in the household budget.”
On CNN with Audie Cornish: “Pricing used to be simple. How much does it cost to make something? Add a little bit of a profit margin on top, put a sticker on it, set it, and leave it. Not anymore. Today, pricing is a highly engineered science, and corporations are using new technologies to reach deeper into our wallets… This is coming for every line item in your household budget. We see algorithmic price fixing in the rental market. We see experiments like those my organization exposed at Instacart in the grocery aisle. And of course, the travel industry is one of the top culprits for this.”
On Jon Stewart’s The Weekly Show: “In the book, I’m really focused on the ways in which new technologies have allowed tech companies to supercharge these age-old impulses and reinvent the ripoff. And these days, you can get price fixing across industries and sectors where coordination would be impossible but for the players using a common algorithm.”
In the Daily Mail: “When you next log on to your favorite grocery app to order food for the week, you’ll probably assume the price you see on screen is the same price other shoppers will pay for their haul. You’d be wrong. Because, while you browse bunches of bananas and jars of peanut butter, an algorithm is probably hard at work running code, tracking every scroll and click, figuring out how high it can set your price tag before you change your mind and walk away.”
In The Guardian: “I think American shoppers are exhausted. High prices make shopping pretty treacherous. Adding insult to injury is the increasingly opaque manipulative and volatile way that corporate America does pricing. This reinvention of the rip-off that we’re all living through has undermined trust in one of the major ways we participate in the economy.”
In the Washington Post: “I think the rights and the protections that consumers have in the retail space have eroded considerably … and I don’t think our consumer laws have kept up. I don’t think that shoppers should be subjected to gouging as soon as they cross state lines. We do need federal standards. I think the 12 different rights outlined in the Shoppers’ Bill of Rights, taken together as a whole, would go a really long way to balancing the scales for shoppers in this country and would save us a lot of time and money.”