Gouged: The End of a Fair Price—And What That Means for Your Wallet Publishes September 29
Lindsay Owens, Executive Director of Groundwork Collaborative and leading expert on corporate power and affordability, shared today that her debut book, Gouged: The End of a Fair Price—And What That Means for Your Wallet, will be published September 29. Gouged, a rigorously reported exposé of how corporations are using data, algorithms, and digital manipulation to systematically overcharge consumers, will be published by Viking and is currently available for pre-order.
For years, Owens has been one of the most prominent voices warning about the growing threat of corporate pricing power and AI-enabled pricing technology. Owens has spearheaded investigations exposing how new corporate pricing schemes and technologies manipulate consumers into paying more. Her research has launched media firestorms, spurred FTC probes, and forced major companies like Google, Delta, and Instacart to respond and, in some cases, abandon new pricing approaches. As a leading national voice on the cost of living crisis and a groundbreaking researcher on economic conditions for working Americans, she is widely credited with sparking a national conversation about the role of “greedflation” in the economy.
Gouged is the culmination of that work, drawing on extensive research including analysis of earnings call transcripts, SEC filings, and corporate patents to build a sweeping indictment of what she describes as a fundamental and largely hidden transformation in how pricing works in the modern economy. In the book, Owens details how this shift is quietly making every single line item in the household budget more expensive—and lays out what both consumers and policymakers can do to push back against this new frontier in corporate profiteering.
Owens shared the following statement about her forthcoming book:
“Gouged pulls back the curtain on the pricing systems that have been perfected to squeeze every last dollar from us. It’s a book about a new era of corporate profiteering: supercharged by technology, enabled by corporate consolidation, and often hidden behind the fog of crisis and complexity. Price hikes themselves aren’t new. But the tools companies use to engineer them are.
These systems undermine fair markets, drain household budgets, distort the economy, and accelerate the disappearance of one of the most basic promises in American life: the fair price.”
Gouged takes readers inside the corporate boardrooms where pricing decisions are made and exposes the mechanics behind practices that are growing ubiquitous across the economy: dynamic and algorithmic pricing, surveillance-based price discrimination, hidden fees, and dark patterns—the manipulative design tricks that steer consumers into paying more than they intended or signing up for subscriptions they never wanted. Owens traces how these tools are being weaponized against shoppers paying for groceries, housing, travel expenses, insurance premiums, and more—and what consumers and policymakers can do to fight back.
Gouged: The End of a Fair Price—And What That Means for Your Wallet publishes September 29 from Viking.
To request an advanced copy of Gouged or speak with Lindsay Owens about her book and how surveillance, pricing algorithms and other technologies have enabled a new frontier in corporate profiteering, contact Lena Little at lena.little@lkl-pr.com.