U.S. consumers aren’t just frustrated with high prices. They’re angry and confused about the increasingly high-tech ways that restaurant chains and major retailers are setting those prices.
Digital price tags are rapidly replacing paper ones in grocery aisles. Artificial intelligence tools help businesses decide what to charge by predicting how customers might respond. Terms like “dynamic pricing” and “surveillance pricing” are stirring anxiety on social media, where users wonder if different people are getting different prices for the same product.
Americans have grown accustomed to changing prices when booking flights, hotel rooms and rides, but the prospect of everyday spending shaped by algorithms they don’t understand and personal data they may not realize they’re sharing has touched a nerve.
Those electronic tags have been in Europe for a while. The issue in the US appears to be less those tags and more the lack of consumer and data protection. If for example prices are allowed to change once per day amd must not be changed based on individualised surveillence, abuse potential of these digital price tags is somewhat limited.