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As Trump’s war in Iran drives up gas, grocery, and travel prices for Americans, oil executives are celebrating the $23 billion in windfall profits created by the crisis.
"It’s going to be virtually impossible to avoid price hikes for summer fun, whether that’s a road trip, that’s a flight, a vacation, whether that’s a couple nights in a hotel, or whether that’s a backyard barbecue," Lindsay Owens, Groundwork Collaborative’s executive director, said. "If you sit inside and watch TV, you’re going to be paying more for your AC."
Surveillance pricing is using data to potentially alter a price based on the customer's behavior, said Lindsay Owens, executive director of Groundwork Collaborative.
Lindsay Owens: “Traveling is obviously a real budget-buster. Most families are aware of that, but what people may not realize is your Memorial Day barbeque is going to set you back big time this year.”
Across party lines, nearly 80% of voters say it is unfair for companies to use personal data to set prices and demand a ban on the practice.
The price for a classic apple pie has skyrocketed nearly 40%, bratwursts are up nearly 30%, and watermelon will run 17% more, while travel prices soar heading into summer.
Kitty Richards: “We're really seeing consistently that voters feel like the economy is headed in the wrong direction. And they care very, very deeply about the cost of living and affordability, and that has been on voters' minds throughout the past year, but it's really the war with Iran and the effect that that has had on energy prices.”
"You have people focusing on their utility bills as a front-line political issue for the first time in years, and they’re pointing the finger at people they had never really paid attention to before,” said Alex Jacquez, chief of policy and advocacy at progressive think tank Groundwork Collaborative and an economic policy aide in the Biden White House.
Gouged: The End of a Fair Price—And What That Means for Your Wallet Publishes September 29.
“Sometimes they’re collecting data that we don’t realize we’re giving away freely, like tracking our mouse movements, looking at what we hover over. And they’re amalgamating all that data and using it to basically create a sort of individualized demand curve for us to estimate with some level of precision exactly how much we’re willing to pay for an item.”