Surveillance Pricing, Explained: Why Your Price Isn’t Mine

Why do different people see different prices for the same thing? In a 2025 test, shoppers who filled the same grocery cart, in the same store, at the same time, saw different prices for three out of four items. Some were 23 percent apart. This animated explainer follows that experiment, then goes back to a time before price tags, when every price was a conversation and the seller guessed what you would pay. We meet the Loom, our picture of the software that weaves your data (where you are, what you browse, what you bought) into a guess of your willingness to pay. We look at what happened when Amazon and Coca-Cola tried something similar, why most people find it unfair, the surprising finding that some customers even pay less, and the new laws that now make some stores warn you. Forecasts are labelled as forecasts in the film; they are our own take, not facts. Every factual statement in the narration is checked against a source. Main sources Groundwork Collaborative, Consumer Reports and More Perfect Union: Same Cart, Different Price (December 2025) U.S. Federal Trade Commission: Surveillance pricing study, preliminary staff findings (January 2025) Kahneman, Knetsch and Thaler: Fairness as a Constraint on Profit Seeking, American Economic Review (1986) Dubé and Misra: Personalized Pricing and Consumer Welfare, Journal of Political Economy (2023) NPR Planet Money: The Price Tag Hasn't Always Existed, It Had To Be Invented (2018) OECD: Personalised Pricing in the Digital Era (2018) New York Attorney General on the Algorithmic Pricing Disclosure Act (2025) Maryland General Assembly: HB 895 (2026) Further sources include Instacart, Walmart, Delta Air Lines, Computerworld, The New York Times, Harvard Business School, the UK Competition and Markets Authority, the European Commission and the City of Seattle. Chapters 0:00 Two prices 0:39 The experiment 1:29 Just a test? 2:13 The price was a conversation 2:42 One price for everyone 3:36 The Loom 4:43 We've been here before 5:32 Why it feels wrong 6:10 A sorting machine 6:57 Why now 8:02 Where it's going 8:34 About you