We Had 400 People Shop for Groceries

What We Found Will Shock You

The age of “surveillance pricing” is upon us. This informative 18-minute video, which summarizes a five-month investigation by advocacy journalism nonprofit More Perfect Union in association with Consumer Reports and Groundwork Collaborative, shares other terms for the shady pricing practice: “algorithmic pricing,” “smart rounding,” “first-degree price discrimination,” “AI for Everyday Price Performance,” and (in Columbia Business School researcher Len Sherman’s colorful words) a “devilishly effective dark art.”

Investopedia defines AI-driven surveillance pricing as the adjusting of prices based on data collected about people’s browsing history, geographic location, purchase history, and other behavioral variables. Like researcher Sherman, one of the journalists involved in this video emphasizes the sneakiness: “This is a very sophisticated, very deliberate, explicit attempt to maximize profits and do so somewhat surreptitiously.”

The video focuses on how surveillance pricing has turned grocery sales into a “goldmine” by segmenting both online and in-store shoppers into different, algorithmically determined price groups. For the retailers, the practice helps move “billions of dollars, one penny at a time,” but for consumers, the investigation found it could cost a family as much as $1,200 a year.

Covid helped open the floodgates—changing retailers’ pricing culture from one of caution to the current “free-for-all”—by pushing shoppers online and allowing corporate giants like Amazon, Walmart, and Instacart to perfect their surveillance pricing tech. Other businesses then adopted the practice to stay competitive.

It is not surprising that surveillance pricing exploded during the wealth-shifting Covid era, for as Lina Khan (FTC chair from 2021 to 2025) remarks, the practice is yet another “big form of wealth transfer from ordinary Americans to massive corporations.” Khan explains that being able to charge each person the maximum amount that algorithms indicate they are able or willing to pay represents a sort of corporate “Holy Grail.”

More Perfect Union shared the following comment subsequent to posting its video on December 9, 2025:

“Since this report was released Instacart’s stock price has fallen. Investors in the company became skittish that they were now exposed to greater legal liability.”

Meanwhile, a wise viewer commented, “THIS is the real reason they want everything to go cashless and make every purchase tied to your identity.” The short video does not delve into solutions, but it stands to reason that paying in person with cash is bound to confound the algorithms!

Watch the video HERE.