TODAY Show investigation inspired by Owens’ research reveals StubHub is charging concert goers different prices for the same tickets
Today, Lindsay Owens, President and CEO of the economic think tank Groundwork Collaborative, joined the TODAY Show to discuss her new book, Gouged: The End of a Fair Price–and What That Means for Your Wallet. You can watch the full TODAY segment here.
Gouged, which hit the shelves on September 29th, is a searing exposé on how corporations are fleecing American consumers on everything from event tickets and rent to food delivery and groceries. On TODAY, Lindsay joined NBC News’ chief consumer investigative correspondent Vicky Nguyen to discuss the high-tech, deceptive pricing practices corporations are using to reinvent the ripoff. Nguyen conducted her own pricing experiments based on Owens’ findings and revealed Stubhub is deploying hidden pricing schemes. Attempting to purchase a Harry Styles concert ticket, Vicky and her team – shopping for the same seat, on the same night, at the same time – were offered prices ranging by more than $60.
”It seemed to me that price hikes were not random anymore, they started to feel rigged,” Owens explained in the segment. She noted that these pricing experiments are not limited to concert tickets, emphasizing, “This is coming for every line item in the household budget.”
Gouged comes at an important time, with recent polling finding 95% of Americans say the US is suffering an affordability crisis. In the segment, Lindsay calls on policymakers to “step in and restore the fair price” by cracking down on these deceptive tactics and emphasizes that it’s not too late to reclaim a fair price.“I don’t think most Americans signed up to be guinea pigs in Subhub’s pricing lab.”
Owens also offers practical advice to turn the experiment against corporations. She explains that shoppers can use multiple devices or incognito mode to mitigate these hikes. “When [StubHub] didn’t have your data breadcrumb trail, they had a harder time deciding how much to charge you.” She also encouraged shoppers to post online about being overcharged to spur lawmakers to take action and ban surveillance pricing.
MORE FROM OWENS:
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.”