Same Cart, Different Price: When the Invisible Hand Becomes an Algorithm (with Lindsay Owens)

Summary

Podcast Summary

Episode Overview

Title: Same Cart, Different Price: When the Invisible Hand Becomes an Algorithm (with Lindsay Owens)
Podcast: Pitchfork Economics with Nick Hanauer
Date: March 10, 2026
Main Theme:
This episode delves into the modern, algorithm-driven world of "personalized" and discriminatory pricing, specifically focusing on findings from a new Consumer Reports/Groundwork Collaborative study about Instacart. The conversation explores how algorithmic price-setting—now the norm—undermines traditional notions of fair pricing, competition, and consumer choice, with profound consequences for affordability, transparency, and economic fairness.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. From Trickle-Down Economics to Middle-Out (00:02–00:29)

• The hosts, Paul and Goldie, assert that decades of trickle-down economics have failed, and “middle-out” economics is gaining ground—an approach where the middle class is seen as the engine of growth.
• Quote: "The middle class is the source of growth, not its consequence." – Goldie (00:18)

2. Growing Resentment Toward Algorithms (00:47–02:39)

• Paul recounts his “algorithmic burnout”—frustration with tech platforms constantly tracking behavior, shaping recommendations, and pushing ads based on user data.
• Goldie humorously compares Paul’s growing aversion to a Ted Kaczynski-style, off-the-grid lifestyle.
• Both express suspicion and exhaustion about constant, invisible data collection.

3. The “Invisible Hand” as Algorithm (03:02–04:32)

• Goldie introduces the episode’s central insight: what we’ve been taught as the “invisible hand” of the market is now often a literal, opaque algorithm.
• The upcoming interview will examine how platforms like Instacart use these algorithms to maximize profits by personalizing price—even between otherwise identical shopper scenarios.

4. How the Instacart Pricing Study Came Together (04:41–09:03)

• Lindsay Owens, Executive Director of the Groundwork Collaborative, describes her background as a “fan girl” of consumer advocacy and the genesis of their collaboration with Consumer Reports.
• They began investigating how AI-driven pricing tech companies empower retailers to maximize consumer willingness to pay via real-time experimentation.
• A particular focus: Instacart’s acquisition of Eversight, an AI company specializing in “pricing experiments.”
• The research combined efforts from Groundwork, Consumer Reports, and More Perfect Union, leveraging Consumer Reports’ volunteer base for large-scale data gathering.

5. Experimental Design & Key Findings (09:03–11:43)

• Volunteers across the U.S. placed identical orders of 20 grocery items via Instacart—across the same stores and timeframes—taking screenshots of their cart totals.
• Groundwork’s analysis found:
  • Everyone was “experimented upon,” with every item subject to price variation.
  • Price variance was up to 23% for a single item—even between simultaneous, identical orders.
  • When extrapolated, the cumulative effect could cost some families an extra $1,200/year—enough to cover rent in many cities.
• Quote: “These were pretty big differences. A $1,200 a year hit is potentially a real serious contributor to the affordability crisis.” – Lindsay Owens (11:25)

6. The End of One-Price-Fits-All (11:43–14:50)

• Goldie and Lindsay discuss how the “efficient market” theory—where prices are set objectively by supply and demand—is undermined by hidden algorithmic pricing.
• Today’s price isn’t set by costs and competition but by an engineered system that scrapes data, monitors consumer behavior, and runs ongoing tests to optimize profits.
• Quote: “This ain’t your mama’s price tag…Today, pricing is a highly engineered science.” – Lindsay Owens (12:07)

7. Legality and Fairness of Discriminatory Pricing (14:50–17:28)

• Much price discrimination is legal, provided it doesn’t target protected groups (race, religion, etc.). Examples: senior/veterans discounts are accepted, but hidden, algorithmic upcharges are more troubling.
• Legislation is emerging at state and federal levels to address “surveillance pricing.”
• Quote: “What you can't do is charge me more than you because you've taken a peek in my wallet.” – Lindsay Owens (17:09)

8. Impact on Market Functionality & Consumer Agency (17:28–19:26)

• Hidden price variation destroys traditional comparison-shopping; consumers must now compare prices within the same brand/platform using different logins, devices, or even at different times.
• Lindsay calls this “wild-west” pricing a “dystopian” scenario demanding regulatory intervention, not just individual consumer vigilance.

9. Algorithmic Wage Discrimination (19:26–21:42)

• The same logic used to maximize prices is used to minimize pay to gig workers (Uber, Instacart, etc.): algorithms determine the lowest wage a worker will accept at any given moment.
• Noted legal scholars, like Veena Dubal, are researching this trend.

10. Retailer Roles, Platform Power, and “Tacit Collusion” (21:42–25:50)

• Instacart sometimes partners with retailers on experiments, and sometimes “scrapes” without their direct involvement (e.g., Conflict with Target described at 21:42–23:58).
• Regulators are probing if Instacart, as a “platform monopoly,” could be encouraging tacit collusion among retailers by unifying price-setting algorithms and data.
• Quote: “Does Google, via Gemini’s commerce arm, start to have the ability to coordinate price across the economy? …that would obviously be a real problem.” – Lindsay Owens (25:51)

11. Policy Solutions and Legislative Action (27:07–29:20)

• Lindsay advocates for “one fair price”—same item, same time, same price for all.
• Options include: banning surveillance pricing, curtailing high-frequency “dynamic” pricing except for genuine scarcity scenarios, and enforcing greater transparency.
• New Jersey and other states are moving on this; at the federal level, Congress and the FTC are beginning to act.
• Quote: “We’re a big fan of the concept of one fair price...Two people shouldn’t pay different prices for the same item at the same time.” – Lindsay Owens (27:15)

12. Transparency, Competition, and Sector Consolidation (29:20–32:27)

• Transparency (such as warning users if an algorithm sets their price) is a useful first step, though not sufficient in highly consolidated markets.
• Grocery retail is especially concentrated: the top four chains control two-thirds of the U.S. market.
• Real-world cases include sweetheart deals between Walmart and Pepsi/Frito Lay that undermine small business competition.
• Quote: “All sorts of problems emerge in concentrated markets where firms have pricing power.” – Lindsay Owens (31:08)

13. Motivation and Closing Thoughts (32:27–38:09)

• Lindsay’s motivation is rooted in tackling inequality and corporate power to support workers and average consumers.
• Hosts and Lindsay agree that algorithm-driven pricing and wage-setting are dangerous and dystopian, demanding regulation, transparency, and competition.
• Quote: “I am feeling even more paranoid...stores now use e-ink price tags—at some point in the future, I could literally encounter a different price while I’m still in the same store.” – Paul (33:22)
• Goldie highlights that while governments are often blamed for inflation/destabilization, it’s corporations leveraging consumer data for micro-optimization of price that now present the greater risk.
• A humorous closing: to defeat the algorithms, Paul jokes, "everybody has to be like me and be totally erratic and irrational…and therefore incapable of algorithms pegging you." (37:41)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

| Timestamp | Speaker | Quote/Insight | |-----------|----------------|------------------------------------------------| | 00:18 | Goldie | "The middle class is the source of growth, not its consequence." | | 03:36 | Goldie | "I’m not claiming that we are living inside a simulation, I’m claiming that...the invisible hand is actually an algorithm." | | 11:25 | Lindsay Owens | “These were pretty big differences...potentially a real serious contributor to the affordability crisis.” | | 12:07 | Lindsay Owens | "This ain’t your mama’s price tag…Today, pricing is a highly engineered science." | | 17:09 | Lindsay Owens | "What you can't do is charge me more than you because you've taken a peek in my wallet." | | 27:15 | Lindsay Owens | "Two people shouldn’t pay different prices for the same item at the same time." | | 31:08 | Lindsay Owens | "All sorts of problems emerge in concentrated markets where firms have pricing power." | | 33:22 | Paul | "I am feeling even more paranoid...stores now use e-ink price tags—at some point in the future, I could literally encounter a different price while I’m still in the same store." | | 37:41 | Goldie | "..everybody has to be like me and be totally erratic and irrational and therefore incapable of algorithms pegging you." |

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• 00:02–00:29: Introduction to middle-out economics
• 00:47–02:39: Algorithmic burnout and consumer tracking
• 03:02–04:32: The invisible hand as an algorithm; introduction to topic
• 04:41–09:03: Lindsay Owens explains her background and how the study came about
• 09:03–11:43: Study design and shocking findings
• 12:07–14:50: How algorithmic pricing disrupts traditional markets
• 14:50–17:28: The (il)legality of surveillance/algorithmic pricing
• 17:28–19:26: How opaque pricing undoes consumer choice and market competition
• 19:26–21:42: Algorithmic wage discrimination
• 21:42–25:50: How platforms and retailers interact on pricing; potential for collusion
• 27:07–29:20: Policy proposals and what "fair price" would look like
• 29:20–32:27: Transparency in pricing and market consolidation
• 32:27–38:09: Motivation, dystopian implications, and final reflections

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Conclusion

This episode makes a compelling case that digital platforms have radically—and often covertly—re-engineered the foundations of commerce. Where once “the price” was a fact of nature, today it’s a shifting target, optimized for corporate profit and tailored individually by algorithms. The result is less transparency, fairness, and consumer control—and a landscape ripe for regulatory action. As Lindsay Owens puts it, "This ain’t your mama’s price tag." The ordinary consumer, and even the gig worker, is both the subject and the product in this brave new market.

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For more, see Consumer Reports’ exposé, "Same Cart, Different Price."

Transcript

[Paul]

The rising inequality and growing political instability that we see today are the direct result of decades of bad economic theory.

[Goldie]

The last five decades of trickle down economics haven't worked. But what's the alternative?

[Paul]

Middle out economics is the answer because

[Goldie]

the middle class is the source of growth, not its consequence.

[Paul]

That's right.

[Lindsay Owens]

This is Pitchfork Economics with Nick Hanauer, a podcast about how to build the economy from the middle out. Welcome to the show.

[Paul]

Hi, Goldie.

[Goldie]

Hello, Paul.

[Paul]

You know, the other day I was listening to the radio here in Seattle. We have a radio station, it's called kexp.

[Goldie]

Wait, wait, this is like over the air terrestrial. It's not a podcast. You have to listen to it live.

[Paul]

Exactly. I was listening to the radio.

[Goldie]

What are you, 140?

[Paul]

Getting there. But I. So I was listening to the radio and I noticed that I had a sort of calmness about me as I was listening to the radio and I was thinking about what was going on and I realized that I was enjoying the fact that I could passively listen to the radio without fears of an algorithm interfering. I realized, okay, I'm an Apple Music subscriber, right? And I generally like the service a lot, but if I stop paying attention to the playlist and it plays a couple of folk songs in a row and I don't click down or switch to another song or something like that, Apple Music is just like trying to make all of my playlists sound like the inside of a Starbucks from like 1998.

[Goldie]

Ah, back when Starbucks was at its best, though.

[Paul]

Yeah, sure. Yes. Yeah, the peak Norah Jones era. But I sort of realized exactly how taxing the algorithmic feed is on my, on my thing thinking, right? Like, I can't listen to a song that I kind of don't like because Apple is going to take that as like, as consent to play more of it. And, and it's just sort of exhausting, you know, like thinking about how all of these things measure. You search for a product, you search for shoes, and then for the next three months you're getting ads about shoes even though you already bought the shoes that you wanted. And it's like a trail of garbage that just follows you around the Internet. And, and I'm starting to experience a sort of algorithmic burnout. I'm just sick of it. I'm sick of things trying to predict based on past behavior.

[Goldie]

Man, I haven't heard a manifesto like that since the Unabomber. I think what you need, Paul, is not just a shack out in Montana, but a shack built Inside of a Faraday box.

[Paul]

Man, that sounds pretty good right now. I'm not gonna lie.

[Goldie]

I tease, I tease. But I'm with you on that. I am very suspicious. And, you know, it's funny. And this gets, of course, to the topic of today's episode, a report that came out in December that turns out, and I never knew this, I had misunderstood this for a long time, that the invisible hand is actually an algorithm.

[Paul]

Oh, yeah, I guess that's true, isn't it?

[Goldie]

It's totally invisible and it's setting market prices.

[Paul]

It turns out you just blew my mind a little bit.

[Goldie]

I'm not claiming that we are living inside a simulation. I'm claiming that as we will learn from today's guest, Lindsay Owens, the executive director of the Groundwork Collaborative, that in fact, what prices that we think are just, well, that's the price and we pay it. When you're ordering through services like Instacart, they're actually playing around with the prices to see how much profit they can extract from you. And that in fact, different people ordering at the exact same moment, the exact same product from the exact same store are being charged very different prices. A conclusion to this report that I found both shocking and entirely unsurprising.

[Paul]

Absolutely. And that's why I'm excited to talk to Lindsey. So let's get into it.

[Lindsay Owens]

So I'm Lindsay Owens. I'm the executive director of Groundwork Collaborative. We're a Washington D.C. based economic policy think tank. And I'm also the author of a forthcoming book available for pre order now, the End of a Fair price and what that means for your wallet.

[Goldie]

Great. Well, thanks for joining us.

[Lindsay Owens]

Thanks for having me.

[Paul]

I want to say first that I am a huge nerd for Consumer Reports. I read my parents copy cover to cover every every month and I didn't feel like an adult until I had my own subscription. So I am curious how this project collaboration with Consumer Reports and more Perfect Union came.

[Lindsay Owens]

Yeah, well, I should say I'm a huge, huge fan of Consumer Reports myself similarly inherited that from my parents have also just been a real fan girl of the consumer movement and some of the lions of the consumer movement. I got a chance to work for Senator Warren when I first moved to Washington D.C. and obviously she's been so influential in that space founding the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. I once got to do a podcast that was a real highlight of my career with Ralph Nader. He actually joined from his landline phone. But yeah, so like, totally Stan. The Consumer Reports family, the Legacy all of it. So Consumer Reports runs this really amazing coalition devoted to understanding the role of technology on consumers, and in particular how the price tag is really being eroded because of modern technologies. And Groundwork was invited to join that coalition a few years back. And so they have become really just instrumental partners in our work. This particular collaboration and the sort of idea behind the Instacart study really came out of Groundwork's now 5 years old body of research looking at corporate earnings calls and understanding how corporations talk about prices and new pricing technology and the future of pricing. And for several years our focus was really on Greedflation, how companies were able to pass along their rising costs, but then go for a little more. But beginning in 2024, we expanded the scope of that work and we started to be interested in pricing advisors, pricing consultants, and pricing tech companies, particularly AI pricing tech companies. And there were a number of those companies that really caught our ey. One early company was called Fetcher. This is an Israeli artificial intelligence company that does the pricing science for Delta. And they got in a little trouble last summer when people sort of learned from their earnings calls that Delta was exploring some pretty exploitative pricing practices, thanks to this collaboration with Fetcher. But one of the other companies that caught our eye was a company called Eversight, another AI pricing company that boasts about their ability to help companies run experiments on consumers, to help them determine exactly how much a consumer is willing to pay. And as we started digging into Eversight, we learned that Instacart had actually acquired Eversight in 2022. And so that became very interesting to us because we knew that Instacart had had bought up an AI company focused on pricing experiments. We assumed that they purchased that company to run those experiments. And so we wanted to see if, figure out by running our own experiment, just what the consequences of Instacart's experiments were for consumers. So that is a little bit of a long winded answer, but that's the sort of origin here. An incredible team of researchers at groundware took that project to the Consumer Reports Coalition and a really happy marriage was born between the three organizations. And of course, if you want to run an experiment, you need participants. And Consumer Reports Reports has millions of members. And they were able to recruit an amazing group of volunteers who are interested in helping us with this experiment.

[Paul]

Yeah, and it's super interesting that it's a live experiment. We read a lot of policy reports, you know, but nothing quite like this. So I was wondering if you could sort of walk us through the experiment. What you were trying to find out and how it worked and why you did it this way, as opposed to, you know, relying on their own data and things like that.

[Lindsay Owens]

Yeah, look, I mean, I think it was elegant, but it was incredibly simple. We asked volunteers to log on, fire up Instacart on their computer. Then we said, hey, please select the following grocery items. We picked about 20 items. Breakfast items, lunch items, dinner items, store brand items, name brand items, pantry staples, produce, you know, wanted to get a little bit of everything. We asked them to get those items, put them in their cart, and take a screenshot of the prices. And we also asked them to pick up those items. Like, you know, Instacart is a. Is a grocery platform. And so when you log on to Instacart, you go shop at a specific grocery store. And so we had them shop at a grocery store. Target is one of them, pick up those items, and then take screenshots of the prices. And then from there, we took the screenshots, and a team of really great research assistants at Groundwork Collaborative combed through all of the screenshots and inputted the prices into a spreadsheet so that we could analyze the data. And when we analyzed the data, what we learned is that Instacart's experiments were incredibly widespread. Every single individual in the study was experimented upon. Every single item in the 20 item grocery basket was party to the experiment in some way. And price variation from item to item varied as much as 23%. This wasn't a nickel here, a dime there. These were pretty big differences. Of course, you know, a 23% price hike for one item, you know, might be a dollar or two, but we don't buy one grocery item. We buy a whole basket of groceries, and we don't go to the grocery store once a year. We go every week. And so when we added up the potential consequences of the variation in pricing from, you know, one item to the next across the entire year, we used Instacart's own estimate of how much a family spends on groceries in a year. You know, we found that these experiments could be costing some families as much as $1,200 a year. That's as much or more than, you know, the price of rent for a one bedroom in a lot of major American cities. So potentially a real serious contributor to the affordability crisis.

[Goldie]

I'm confused here because I was taught that prices are set through an efficient and impartial equilibrium between supply and demand. And you're telling me that they're actually being set by price consultants and AI algorithms that are trying to maximize profits. How is this possible?

[Lindsay Owens]

Yeah, this is a great question. And look, this ain't your mama's price tag, right? Like it is a whole new world. You know, the rudimentary form of pricing really, since the price tag was invented. Initially the Quakers actually brought us the price tag. They didn't like haggling. They thought it was really unfair. They, they felt like every man should be treated equal under God. And that should be also true in commerce. Then John Wanamaker says, hey, I think I'm gonna borrow the price tag and put it in my Wanamaker's department store in. And that gets us to the kind of modern, you know, price tag in larger retail spaces. And that was with us for a really long time. You know, companies set the price by looking at how much it costs to make something, thinking a little bit about what you'd be willing to pay, and then thinking a little bit about what their competitors were charging. They stuck a price tag on it and then they went about their business. And today pricing is a highly engineered science. There are armies of pricing advisors and pricing consultants and pricing tech companies. They scrape data from across the web to monitor competitor pricing in real time. They run experiments to test your maximum willingness to pay for a specific item. The worst case scenario for Instacart is you get on the website and you start doing your grocery shopping. And then you get to your cart and you close your computer and you decide to go to the grocery store. They are really working hard to figure out exactly how much they can charge you before you will decide to do your grocery shopping yourself. So it's important for their business model to sort of figure that out and calibrate that. So, you know, these experiments are worth a lot to them. They're figuring out how much markup they can layer on top of the underlying retailers costs. And you know, they're not only doing that because they make profit from selling groceries, they're also doing that because this is really valuable data that is also interesting to the retailers themselves. And so there's a sort of data business that, that is of course involved with all of these, you know, tech companies. And grocery tech companies are no different than any other tech company. By the way, brick and mortar grocery stores spend quite a bit of time as data companies. One of Kroger's largest book of businesses is actually selling your data. You punch in your loyalty card when you go to Kroger. They learn a lot about the kinds of things that you like to buy. They have a lot of historical data. Because you go to the grocery store a lot, they actually make a lot of money. It's sort of their higher margin book of business than groceries. Is actually selling your data. Yeah.

[Goldie]

Is discriminatory pricing strictly legal? I know they're calling this an experiment. They're experimenting. It's not based on who you are necessarily, but if they could say, like this particular profile, by whatever means they're profiling you, we'll pay more for this item and that profile will pay less. And so we're just going to charge these people more and these people less. Is that legal?

[Lindsay Owens]

Yeah, look, so there's a whole host of price discrimination that's perfectly legal. Right. And we actually think of a lot of kind of price discrimination as sort of fine. Right. So a good example is there are senior discounts, there are AARP discounts, there are veterans and military discounts. There are all sorts of things that sort of offer one price for one group of people and another price for another group of people. This type of price discrimination, where they're, you know, setting one price for you and one price for me, is also often legal, particularly if the difference doesn't come down to a protected class. There are certain forms of price discrimination that are illegal. Right. We have strong protections against forms of price discrimination in the mortgage market, for example. Right. Like you can't charge one person a higher interest rate than another based on things like race or religion, for example. But there is a lot of price discrimination, as you point out, that's perfectly legal. And part of the reason that I think people are paying attention to new forms of pricing, whether it's the pricing experiments in the Instacart study or a topic that's getting a lot of attention recently called surveillance pricing. This idea that companies sort of spy on you, learn characteristics about you, and then use those characteristics to set a price for you. You know, people are interested in it because we do need new policy solutions. And there are a host of states who are pursuing legislation to eliminate and ban this practice. And there are some proposals at the federal level as well.

[Goldie]

Yeah. But there's a big difference between transparent pricing like discounts, like getting a senior discount that's published, we all know, and, oh, we're not going to tell you, but we're charging you 10% more because we've determined you're willing to pay 10% more.

[Lindsay Owens]

Yep. And that's exactly what the legislation says. Look, transparent, broadly applicable discounts by groups are totally fine. You can Have a Memorial Day mattress sale. You can have a senior discount. You can have an early bird discount. You can have a happy hour. What you can't do is charge me more than you because you've taken a peek in my wallet.

[Paul]

So building this out a little bit. If shoppers can't see the same prices right. If I'm not shopping Instacart on Goldie's phone, do markets still work the way that we understand them to work? Comparison shopping sort of encourages competition between retailers. Does that eliminate competition? Is that where we're going with all this?

[Lindsay Owens]

Yeah, I mean, it has completely upended shopping as we know it. And I would argue, given the role of consumption in our economy, it is completely upended the economy as we know it. You were exactly right that comparison shopping is a bedrock how we think about competition and fairness in commerce. And this has eroded our ability to do that. Fair and transparent markets are important. Honest markets are important. When people ask me sort of what they can do to avoid this, you know, I always hesitate to give an answer because I do really think it shouldn't be up to us individually as consumers to kind of duck and dodge and bob and even try to beat the machine. But at the same time, until lawmakers address this, consumers do have to fend for themselves in this wild west of pricing. And one thing that is interesting is, you know, it is no longer enough to comparison shop across brands. You now need to comparison shop within brands, which is to say, check out what the price is in the brick and mortar store versus online. Check out what the price is online versus in app. Check out what the price is when you're logged in versus when you're not. Ask your spouse sitting next to you on the couch to log in and see if they get the same price as you. Ask your roommate to fire up Uber and see if they get a better price than you.

[Goldie]

You.

[Lindsay Owens]

Right. That is the kind of comparison shopping that this new world of pricing has sort of forced upon us. And it's sort of one that is quite dystopian. And I think we're really due for a correction here. Are.

[Goldie]

Are they playing the same sort of games on the other end of this with the instacart shoppers where some one might be getting X amount compensation and somebody else is getting a different amount for the same task?

[Paul]

Oh, you mean the employees? Not the.

[Goldie]

Yes, the employees, the people. Because I saw this with an Uber driver where he actually asked me because he can't see it anymore what I'm being charged and I was just going from downtown D.C. to National Airport, and it was a $20 ride, and he was only being paid $5.

[Lindsay Owens]

Yeah. So surveillance pricing is a form of algorithmic price discrimination. And we also see algorithmic wage discrimination, and there are a number of really smart legal scholars who've been looking at this for quite some time. Vino Dubal is the foremost among them. But, yes, we absolutely do see algorithmic wage discrimination, where just as companies are interested in figuring out the maximum amount you're willing to pay for an item, they're also interested in figuring out the minimum amount they can pay a worker for a shift or a ride. And it is the flip side of the same coin. But for companies, this is great. It is a way to both drive down their costs and drive up their revenue. So it's a win win for them. Especially for companies who do this on both sides of the ledger, like your Ubers, who deploy both algorithmic price discrimination and algorithmic wage discrimination.

[Goldie]

Yeah, I'm convinced that when I'm at, I never take it, but I always check it. Now I'm convinced when I get into the airport, the, the further I am away from the Uber pickup, the cheaper it is. And as I, in distance get closer, the price seems to rise. So, yeah, you get off the plane, oh, it's only $40, but by the time you get your bag and you get there, it's now $70. And I'm. I'm almost certain they're just geo tracking me at that point. I just want to be clear, because I've never used Instacart. You're being billed. If I'm using Instacart to shop at Target, I'm being billed by Instacart. Target's not getting a part of this, A piece of this. Right. Or are they?

[Lindsay Owens]

Well, so this is interesting. You're being billed by Instacart. Yes. But through the course of our study, one of the things that we learned in Consumer Reports is a very reputable journalism outlet. And so they, you know, sent the retailers that were part of our study, the study, and said, hey, would you like to comment on this? And gave them time to comment before we published our report. And we learned some really interesting things. One thing we learned is that Instacart does partner with a set of retailers directly. And so those retailers and Instacart are party to these experiments together. Right. And we don't know exactly what the contours of that relationship is, but we know they have a formal experimental relationship. Right. There were a set of companies who were sort of in cahoots with Instacart in these experiments. There were other companies and Target was one of them who responded back to us and said, hey, we actually don't run these experiments. And so then we had to go back to Instacart and say, hey, Instacart, Target says they're not doing this. And what we learned, because Instacart disclosed this to us when sort of caught red handed, is that Instacart was scraping Target price data and using it in their experiments. And Instacart's experiments on Target were designed to assess how much margin Instacart could take on top of the Target grocery basket. So they were really looking to see, like, what could you, like what can you layer on top of a Target shopper if you're Instacart before they walk. Interestingly, Instacart said that that was a temporary experiment and they had stopped that experiment. And we just happened to be running our experiment in the middle of their experiment on Target. So that was really interesting. I'm still sort of waiting for a reporter to get more information out of Target about exactly what was going on there. But as we like to say at groundwork at the time that we found this out, the girls are fighting. So there was something going on with Instacart and Target there. We never really got all the way to the bottom of it. Yeah.

[Paul]

So if regulators were to get them under oath, what are the key questions you think they should ask?

[Lindsay Owens]

So there actually are a number of folks who are pursuing this. As we know, the Federal Trade Commission opened an investigation or a probe into this shortly after our study launched this year, Tish James, the Attorney General in New York, sent Instacart a letter asking for a whole host of follow up information. And so it's too early to know what they'll find, but we know a few things. The first thing we know is that Instacart actually stores all of the prices that they display. And we know this because they actually, the company actually looked at our data set and verified that we had all the prices. Right. And it makes sense if you think about it as a large pricing lab. If you're running a lab, you're collecting data and you're archiving and indexing and saving your, you know, your, your data and your specimens. Right. So we know that they have all this data. And I think it's a very interesting data set for regulators to take a peek at, particularly regulators with subpoena Power. So that's one thing we know, one thing that attorneys general have been interested in is understanding the role of, in this case, a kind of platform monopoly like Instacart that's working across many other retailers. And whether or not Instacart's position as a kind of platform monopoly of sorts of could be resulting in some pricing similarity. Right. Some conversion of pricing across different retailers. That would obviously be a real problem. Right. Because, you know, you could have something that looks like tacit collusion as retailers prices start to get more and more similar. This is something where we're quite rental.

[Goldie]

Yeah, yeah.

[Lindsay Owens]

Like what people were worried about with real page. This is also something that, you know, I personally am very worried about. As the chat bots start shopping across multiple retailers. Right. Does Google, via Gemini's commerce arm, start to have the ability to coordinate price across the economy? Right. Across competitors? So that's something that I think retailers should be really interested in. I think you raised this interesting question about what regulators may be able to find out about Instacarts, shoppers or workers.

[Goldie]

Right.

[Lindsay Owens]

Gig workers. So lots of interesting questions here. You know, Instacart has some relationships with Snap, so it'd be interesting to know, you know, what's happening there with SNAP recipients. And there are a number of members of Congress who've started to take a peek into that, and there have been some oversight letters there too. So lots of remaining questions, but I would say more so than sort of getting a full, like, forensic autopsy of Instacart, the question that I'm more interested in is, like, where else is this happening? And, you know, we got a victory in the sense that Instacart agreed to stop algorithmic pricing experiments. But, you know, we didn't get a policy victory. So this is still going on, we assume, in many other settings.

[Paul]

Speaking of policy victories, if you had a magic wand and could redesign the rules for how prices are set, what would you change?

[Lindsay Owens]

Yeah, we have a lot of ideas here. We're a big fan of the concept of one fair price. Right. One Item, 1 price, 2 people shouldn't pay different prices for the same item at the same time. That seems really straightforward to us. You can accomplish that in a few ways, including by banning the practice of surveillance pricing. And we've been helpful in developing legislation along those lines with partners like the American Economic Liberties Project, the Economic Security Project, Tech Equity. Obviously, Consumer Reports has been really influential and their coalition's work on that is really great. Just this week, actually, we saw a new bill introduced in New Jersey to take, to take this on at the state level. And you know, there are a dozen states kind of looking at this and moving this way as well. I'm interested in some curves to dynamic pricing. I think kind of high frequency dynamic pricing has taken on a life of its own. Initially, we would see dynamic pricing mostly when you're trying to ration scarce resources. Right. Plane tickets, concert tickets, things like that. Now we're seeing, you know, Las Vegas casinos are varying the price of sunscreen in their sundry stores. Right. This to me just seems totally unnecessary. The New York Times op ed section did a really fun video around Thanksgiving and they proposed something that I thought was really interesting, which was this idea of like changing the price at a set time. So at 6am the prices change. And then all day long companies have to compete with each other on price. And that gives consumers a little certainty if they're doing price checks or comparison shopping throughout the day. You know, don't know a ton about how that works in practice, but was really interested in the idea. And I've been thinking a little bit about what, what it would look like to put something like that in place. So I think there are a lot of options here. But you know, of course, like surveillance pricing, dynamic pricing, they're not the only way in which shopping has been offended. You know, we know all in pricing, junk fees, subscriptions. You know, E commerce is really a, you know, a series of landmines for consumers. And there's a lot to, there's a lot to take a look at on the pricing front.

[Goldie]

How about transparency, transparent pricing? I hate using all of these gig companies because I. It's not just. I feel like I'm being taken advantage of. I don't want to take advantage of the workers. And I'd feel a lot more comfortable if I knew exactly what I was being charged for.

[Lindsay Owens]

Yeah, yeah, look, I think transparency is a really useful first step. So New York state actually passed a law requiring companies to let consumers know if the price is set by an algorithm using their data. And so that is something that you would now see if you were firing up your Uber app in New York. Because of course, you know, Uber is always using your data because they're using your location. Right. Which is how they get a car to you. So that is something that New York has now. And that law has only been in effect for a couple of months. So it's a little too early to tell what kind of impact it's having on the market. But disclosure can be Helpful when consumers have a lot of choice and they can go elsewhere. But you know, in some cases there are only a couple companies. Both of them are using algorithmic pricing. You know, knowing that they do so is infuriating and not being able to work around it is even more so. So I think disclosure is kind of a useful first foothold or step. But I'm more interested in prohibitions and, and stronger enforcement.

[Goldie]

Yeah, yeah, I'm, I'm old. I still look at the, even if it's online now, the weekly circulars from the supermarkets. See what's on sale that week. Yeah. Know whether I'm buying from Safeway or Kroger depending on that particular week. And yeah, once they publish that price, that's the price.

[Lindsay Owens]

Yeah. And look, I mean, we have very little competition in the grocery sector. Left, right. Four large grocery chains have 2/3 of the market. You know, it's Walmart, which is America's largest grocer now it's Costco, it's Kroger, it's Albertsons. We almost had three. Kroger and Albertsons tried to merge. The Biden administration blocked that merger last year. But when we have limited concentration in the grocery sector, like, we can expect all sorts of abuses of pricing power. And there was a really incredible example that the team at the Institute for Local Self Reliance uncovered earlier this year where they, you know, ascertained that Walmart and Pepsi Frito Lay had a sweetheart deal whereby Pepsi Frito Lay was cheaper at Walmart stores. But the sweetheart deal required that Pepsi Frito Lay not offer its discounted promotional pricing anywhere else, which in effect meant that small businesses all had to offer Pepsi Frito Lay products at higher prices than Walmart. And so all sorts of problems emerge in concentrated markets where firms have pricing power. And it's not always high prices across the board. Sometimes it's unevenly, competitively advantaged and disadvantaged prices.

[Goldie]

Why do you do this work?

[Lindsay Owens]

Oh my gosh. Look, I'm a real materialist at heart and I believe that the inequality that is rampant in the United States is a problem for our economy, but it's also a problem for our social fabric. And I think the more we can build an economy where average consumers and workers can have some economic stability but also have better well being, the better. And so we spend a lot of time at groundwork trying to propose policies that take on problematic and corrosive concentrations of corporate power and, and lift up the well being of consumers and workers.

[Goldie]

So Paul, given your opening rant about Apple Music collecting Data on you. You're feeling any more comfortable after talking to Lindsey?

[Paul]

Well, no. In fact I am feeling even more paranoid especially we didn't really talk about it. But the, the, the fact that stores now use E ink price tags means that I could literally encounter a different price in the same store while they're physically at some point in the future. It's, it's horrifying. It's horrifying.

[Goldie]

But let's, let's just talk about how dystopian this is because there's this thing in the US about oh, we need to be careful about the government spending too much money and going into debt. Cuz then we're going to get hyperinf just like those garbage countries where you walk into the store at 9am and it says it's $5 and by the time you get to the counter it's $7 and oh, that's a future we don't want. And meanwhile that could be happening right now without any inflation. They've just decided that since the time you picked up that grapefruit and the time you went to check out, oh, you're willing to spend about 25% more on that. That's the new price for you personally.

[Paul]

Just last summer, grocery store economists bragged about the fact that grocery stores would be able to charge more for cold water in the summer and ice cream. And they could change it. You know, they could change the price based on the temperature outside at any given point during the day.

[Goldie]

Right. I think it's fun that you mentioned that because you know, Lindsay mentioned that groundwork had been listening to these quarterly conference calls and we all know as prices were going up, that inflation coming out of the pandemic, the CEOs and other executives were literally bragging on the corporate calls about their ability to raise prices. Yeah, they were bragging to investors about how they've been able to increase their margins and increase prices largely because there was this now expectation that prices were going up and they were going to take full advantage of it. And now they are literally bragging about their ability to use algorithms and other tools to manipulate pricing on this individual basis that allows them to maximize profits. And that means to ordinary people like us to extract money from us and send it straight to their shareholders. And the idea that somehow the market is going to fix this, that oh, it's a free market, that invisible hand won't allow this to happen. Because if Instacart is going to manipulate prices to maximize profits, then its non existent competitor is going to swoop in and charge everybody a lower rate. We actually know that, in fact, in these duopolies and triopolies, whatever, these very concentrated markets, that there is a certain amount of collusion that goes on. In fact, Lindsey had mentioned the deal that Pepsi had with Walmart. But for decades, if anybody ever noticed, you walk into your supermarket and one week all the Coke products are on sale, and the next week all of the Pepsi products are on sale. And that's a deal that's like they're buying the end caps, they're paying this promo, and Pepsi gets 26 weeks of the year and Coke gets 26 weeks of the year, and they never overlap. So that type of collusion has long gone on.

[Paul]

But it just gets very dangerous when they have the understanding of us, from, by tracking us, how to wring every single last penny out of us on every single product without, you know, exactly how much we're willing to pay without, you know, before we get angry and walk out of the store. That is dangerous knowledge for basically every single retailer, large retailer in the world to have about us. And we're going to need somebody to intervene or else things are going to get a lot more expensive very quickly.

[Goldie]

Either we need some sort of regulation on this sort of pricing, or everybody has to be like me and be totally erratic and irrational and therefore incapable of algorithms pegging

[Paul]

when you walk without rhythm so you don't disturb the worm. Yeah, yeah, I know. I don't know. All I know is that cabin in a Faraday cage sounds pretty good right about now, honestly.

[Goldie]

Right. Well, if you want to read more about this very, as I said, shocking but unsurprising report, we will provide a link to the show. Notes Same cart, different price. Instacart's price experiments Cost families at checkout.

[Nick Hanauer]

Pitchfork Economics is produced produced by Civic Ventures. If you like the show, make sure to follow, rate and review us wherever you get your podcasts. Find us on other platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and threads. Itchfork Economics. Nick's on Twitter and Facebook as well. Ickhanhauer for more content from us, you can subscribe to our weekly newsletter, the Pitch over on Substack. And for links to everything we just mentioned, plus transcripts and more, visit our website, Pitchfork economics.com as always from our team at Civic Ventures. Thanks for listening. See you next week.