Owens’ New Book Already Prompting Corporate Defenses from Walmart, McDonald’s After Exposing Deceptive Pricing Strategies
Today, Lindsay Owens, President and CEO of the economic think tank Groundwork Collaborative, joined MS NOW’s Morning Joe to discuss her new book, Gouged: The End of a Fair Price–and What That Means for Your Wallet. You can watch the full MS NOW segment here.
Gouged, which hit the shelves on September 29th, is a searing exposé on how corporations are squeezing American consumers out of fair prices on every line item of the household budget. Morning Joe co-anchor Willie Geist was “shocked” by the deceptive price gouging tactics Owens outlines in her book.
On Morning Joe, Owens explained how companies are using Americans’ personal information – such as browsing history, income, zip code, or even how long your mouse hovers over an item – to set a personalized price. “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,” Owens said. “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.”
She also called on Congress to pursue an oversight agenda that holds corporations that are using surveillance pricing and other deceptive pricing tactics to gouge consumers accountable. “When Democrats get the gavels in the new Congress, if they take the majority, they should not focus on investigating what’s going on with the Kennedy Center,” Owens said. “If they want to be meeting Americans where they are and doing resonant investigations, they should be bringing in the corporations that are reinventing the ripoff and emptying Americans’ pocketbooks and holding them to account.”
Last week, Walmart CEO John Furner released an open letter to shoppers, after Owens exposed the retail giant’s high-tech pricing playbook. In the segment, Owens said: “Americans are very interested in hearing from the CEO of Walmart who tells his investors that he loves that his new chatbot Sparky is raising cart totals by 40%, so I think they have a lot to answer for right now. The American people know who is behind these high prices. Corporate America is a big culprit, and I think Democrats would be very smart to conduct investigations into these issues.”
McDonald’s Global Chief Impact Officer Jon Banner also responded, after Owens called out the fast food giant for their use of AI-powered pricing tools and predatory pricing systems designed to figure out how much customers are willing to pay and charge them not a penny less.
Gouged is available online and in bookstores everywhere.
MORE FROM OWENS:
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 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 Boston Globe: “The old pricing rule book, where companies charged what it cost to make something, plus a reasonable margin, is gone. In its place is a new credo: The best price is the one you personally are willing to pay.”
In Marketplace: “I think a fair price is a posted price. A fair price is a predictable price, and a fair price is a price that is set based on the product and not you, the consumer.”
In Fortune: “It wasn’t long ago that if you and I were standing in the checkout line buying the same box of Cheerios, we could be reasonably certain we’d pay the same price. And if you were charged more, you’d assume the cashier made a mistake. We expect prices to be consistent—and that expectation is core to how we understand pricing for essentials like groceries. But over the last few decades, that tacit promise has quietly unraveled.”
In the New York Daily News: “Companies have turned efforts to sign up – and maddening cancellations – into a booming business, one supercharged by the pandemic, when millions of customers shifted their shopping online. Rules like New York City’s – and ideally, a future federal standard like that of the now-struck-down FTC rule – can help to rebalance the scales, giving consumers back some of the power companies have leveraged technology to take 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.”