This story aired in the September 02, 2026 episode of Crosscurrents.
If you've ever wondered why the same flight, hotel room, or grocery item seems to cost a different amount depending on who's buying it, you’re not imagining things. Companies are using the data we expose online, including our location, our browsing habits, even assumptions about our income, to decide what prices to charge us. It's called surveillance pricing, and it's becoming more common across the retail world – from airlines to grocery chains right here in the Bay Area.
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Story Transcript:
REPORTER: My fiancee and I have been invited to a lot of weddings this year. Seriously, a lot of weddings. And we’ve procrastinated some of our travel plans.
HARRIS: Okay. I'm gonna do Thursday through Sunday…
REPORTER: So a few nights ago, we were looking into flights for a trip.
FENZI: …one adult, San Francisco to Cincinnati.
HARRIS: Economy we've got $553 and then first class: a cool $1,800.
REPORTER: We’re both sitting on the couch, using our laptops to look at flights on United Airlines, when we notice something weird.
HARRIS: Economy $524, $507, $419, $612. Ooh, $872.
FENZI: Mine says $871.
HARRIS: That’s, why is it off by a dollar? It’s a whole dollar more expensive. It’s the same flight!
FENZI: Okay, hold on. Hold on. Hold on.
HARRIS: That’s so funny.
REPORTER: Getting charged one extra dollar isn’t that big a deal, but we start to notice a trend: same flights, same days, different prices.
FENZI: Yours is $799 and mine is $805.
HARRIS: What's happening?
FENZI: And then if we go up one tier for that extra leg room, I'm getting $1,254.
HARRIS: And then I'm getting $1,271.
REPORTER: A $17 dollar difference.
HARRIS: Which is a significant jump compared to the economy seats.
FENZI: Do you think it thinks that I'm more likely to buy the cheapest seat available, and then you’re…
HARRIS: …more likely to spend on plus? I’m seething. I hope your microphone is catching that I'm seething.
REPORTER: It’s pretty easy to imagine a big airline conspiracy. But I’m a personal finance reporter, so I decide to ask an expert: Samantha Gordon.
GORDON: There's so many pieces attached to us online: Our IP address, our cookies, our cache, our browsing history.
REPORTER: She’s the chief advocacy officer at Tech Equity, a California think tank that researches consumer tech. And she says our theory – that United Airlines has information about our shopping habits – isn’t far fetched.
GORDON: Maybe they followed you around the internet and gathered more information about you. They might know information that has nothing to do with your shopping history with them, but maybe your browsing history or your search history. All of that exists every time you log on.
REPORTER: Gordon says all of the digital footprints we leave behind help companies to create a portrait of us, that they use to predict what we might be willing to pay.
GORDON: You've gotten used to having a price tag that tells you this item is $3.99. Imagine that price tag doesn't exist, and you walk into the store and you're just bartering for the cost. That's what's happening with your personal information.
REPORTER: This practice of “surveillance pricing” is different from the algorithmic recommendations that have become so common online.
GORDON: All of us sort of know, “I'm gonna get pushed ads on Instagram when I'm searching for swimsuits.” The difference with surveillance pricing is I get pushed all these ads and then companies are like, "We think she can pay 20% more than this customer," or "We think she could pay 5% less than this customer," so using personal data about me to then set a price.
REPORTER: Not what a good or service might be worth on the open market but what I, Francesca, am willing to pay for it. My profile might include my age, race. Whether I have kids or pets. My income.
GORDON: They don't know it for a fact, but they're putting together a profile and saying, "Here's what we think is probably true."
REPORTER: And this kind of personalized pricing model is expanding with the amount of time we spend shopping online or in apps.
GORDON: Right at the same time that everything feels expensive.
REPORTER: Gordon tells me one common data point companies use is geography. They might use your shipping address or zip code to make assumptions about your income.
GORDON: Maybe if you're logging in from San Francisco versus North Dakota you're gonna get different prices for the same item at the same store, because they perceive your affluence differently.
REPORTER: Like assuming someone in the Bay Area makes more money than someone living somewhere else.
REPORTER: I decide to test this geographic upcharge for myself, by calling my mom.
MEG FENZI: Hello.
REPORTER: She lives in a small town in Arizona, and she's retired now, so she lives on a fixed income. We decide to shop together for hotels.
MEG FENZI: All right. So where are we gonna go?
FENZI: Where do you wanna go?
MEG FENZI: I've always wanted to see the lemurs.
FENZI: Okay. Sure.
MEG FENZI: No, I’m just kidding. Let's start small.
REPORTER: We navigate to the booking site Hotel Tonight and look up the cost of one night in Orlando, Florida – making sure to use the same search criteria.
MEG FENZI: Two adults, one room. All right, search.
REPORTER: We notice right away that the search tool is recommending different hotels to us – mine do seem to be more expensive. So we purposely search for the same hotel on the same day.
MEG FENZI: Aloft at SeaWorld for $82 a night.
FENZI: Wait! Me too. But it's a different price.
REPORTER: I’m being charged $4 more!
MEG FENZI: Is that right?
REPORTER: And there’s something else weird.
FENZI: It's offering us different discounts.
REPORTER: We look at another place. This one’s a Radisson.
MEG FENZI: The standard rate is $97, they discounted it to $69.
FENZI: And mine, the base price is $93 per night, and the amount they’re gonna offer me is $74.
MEG FENZI: Oh my!
REPORTER: This is something that comes up again and again on Hotel Tonight. We’re getting different numbers for the full and discounted prices.
FENZI: It doesn't make sense.
MEG FENZI: No, it doesn't make sense. I have no idea why they do this or how they do this.
REPORTER: To be sure, this isn’t a pristine data analysis. But Samantha Gordon says what we’re experiencing is the norm. Companies often use discounts to personalize pricing.
GORDON: So you might think: “Oh, I'm getting a good deal 'cause I got 5% off” but the person sitting next to you got 15% off. So did you really get 5% off or did you pay 10% more?
REPORTER: In this specific situation, I may be getting charged more based on my perceived income, but Gordon says that’s not always the case.
GORDON: If you're a lower-income consumer, you're paying more because there's often a belief that in an affluent neighborhood, maybe you wanna retain that customer. Maybe you know that they'll be able to purchase more over time, and so you're giving better discounts initially to the affluent customers versus the low-income customers.
REPORTER: One thing that does appear to be consistent:
GORDON: Surveillance pricing is wildly unpopular. Consistent polling shows it's somewhere around 80% of Americans dislike this practice and want it banned, and that's true across Republicans and Democrats, Independents.
REPORTER: Even if they’re the ones benefiting from a discount.
GORDON: It is wildly, wildly unpopular.
REPORTER: That’s definitely true for my mom.
MEG FENZI: I don't like it! I don't like it because I thought, "Oh, you know, I use these things a lot." And I think what I'll do is I'll just sign your father up for all these things and use his device side by side with mine and see who gets the better deal.
FENZI: That seems like so much work.
MEG FENZI: It does. And for how much, you know? I mean, we're talking a couple of dollars, but still, it's the premise. It's not...It should be the same for everybody. It’s just that they have our information. And they're playing games with us, I think.
REPORTER: These games can be costly. While a few dollars more on a hotel room might not seem like a lot, those increases add up. Last year, a Consumer Reports investigation found that price variations on Instacart – a San Francisco based company – were costing some families up to $1,200 more on groceries per year.
Lots of consumers take to social media trying to beat this game:
CREATOR 1: First thing you wanna do is open up a new incognito window.
CREATOR 2: Clear your cookies, your browsing history, and change your location.
CREATOR 3: If incognito mode does not do enough, then get a VPN.
REPORTER: Others use the strategy my mom suggested and do some comparison shopping. Samantha Gordon again.
GORDON: Maybe this is the new economy. Like my friends have to come over and we all shop together and we use VPNs and see who's gonna get the best price.
Sounds of KALW staff settling into a conference room.
GALNADGEE JOE-JOHNSON: Anyone got the app or y'all going on the web browser?
REPORTER: I’m trying this out with some of my colleagues at KALW. We’re shopping online for groceries at Safeway, which has a store near our office in San Francisco.
NISH HARJANI: Okay, well my top ones are the Twix Candy Skulls.
REPORTER: Once again, we’re getting different items recommended to us.
JOE-JOHNSON: Where is that?
VICTOR TENCE: Only the cool kids get that one.
REPORTER: Which makes it harder to figure out if we’re comparing the exact same groceries.
JOE-JOHNSON: All right. I got blueberries here for $5.99, limited stock, SNAP EBT eligible.
TARIK ANSARI: Same.
HARJANI: I have blueberries, but they’re $4.39. My blueberries are $4.39.
JOE-JOHNSON: Mine's $5.99, bruh.
ANSARI: Yeah, mine's $5.99 too.
REPORTER: A lot of things look similar. Until we really examine the product details.
FENZI: So I think maybe we've got different “Regenerative Organic Certified” blueberries.
SHEREEN ADEL: Paper towel, double rolls. I get it for $13.99.
TENCE: I'm also getting $13.99.
JULIA HANEY: Mine's $16.99.
REPORTER: Three dollars more for the same paper towels! But the price seems to change as we navigate around the site.
HANEY: Wait, interesting. So when I click on it, then it's $13.99.
JOE-JOHNSON: Okay, okay, okay. Oh. I click on it and…
TENCE: Now there's the $13.99.
JOE-JOHNSON: Wait, what?
REPORTER: I had to talk to Samantha Gordon again to help me understand. I reach her while she’s getting a ride to a meeting.
GORDON: There's essentially all of these deceptive practices going into what we think of as surveillance pricing.
REPORTER: Gordon says it’s hard to know for sure, but we might be the guinea pigs in our own shopping experiment. Earlier this year, the Federal Trade Commission warned that companies will compare the popularity of similar products to figure out the highest price shoppers will tolerate.
GORDON: Technically what might be happening is the product looks the same, but it has the tiniest change. Like it's a quarter inch shorter on the broomstick handle at Home Depot, and therefore it's being offered, you know, at a different price.
REPORTER: So two very similar cartons of blueberries could be a sneaky test of our “willingness to pay.”
ROBERT HEDGES: That's the expression, your willingness to pay
REPORTER: Robert Hedges is a former data executive for Visa. He appeared before a U.S. Senate Judiciary committee in August
to explain how sophisticated consumer surveillance has become. At the hearing, Hedges said companies – like Visa – track all kinds of little details.
HEDGES: The time of day that your research, search, or shopping is occurring… how long you linger on a website, how often you return… comparison shopping behavior. The number of product detail pages or PDPs that you open on a shopping journey signals active comparison shopping.
REPORTER: How you move around a website can reveal whether you’re the kind of person who hunts for a deal on paper towels, or grabs whatever’s in front of you. And that information can be applied, in real time, to your prices.
REPORTER: To make matters worse: Your browsers, your credit cards, your mobile apps – all take what they’ve learned about you. And they sell it to third-party data brokers who add this to a pile of things they already know about you, and sell that back to businesses like your local grocery chain.
GORDON: We’re in a casino economy. The house is gonna win.
REPORTER: Gordon argues that consumers really can’t fight surveillance pricing on an individual level. What’s really needed is legislation. Earlier this year, California lawmakers proposed a bill, AB 2564, that would make surveillance pricing illegal in the state. TechEquity – the non-profit she works for – was one of the co-sponsors. Gordon says the bill targeted retail goods.
GORDON: Groceries, basic household needs, clothes. To have surveillance pricing exist in that part of the economy feels particularly harmful.
REPORTER: Given how many consumers view surveillance pricing as unfair, Gordon thought its passage would be a slam dunk – but that wasn’t the case. The bill passed both the state assembly and senate, only to stall in the final stage of the legislative process on the last day of the session. The biggest hurdle was the issue of discounts. California companies say they don’t want to be barred from offering sales or giving group discounts to seniors or students. Supporters of a surveillance pricing ban say that isn’t a problem.
GORDON: Just disclose to them how they can be eligible for that discount and make that transparent. We see this all the time in stores, right? Like I could walk into Raley's right now, and it's like, "Here's the loyalty club price," right? And I know I'm eligible for that price because I'm a member of their loyalty program.
REPORTER: Gordon wants companies to disclose the calculus behind their discounts and make personalized pricing more visible.
GORDON: Just think about things that would give you the ick, you know?
REPORTER: If a company has to explain that I’m getting a discount because of my race, or age, or the fact that I haven’t ordered cat litter in a month and I’m probably getting desperate.
GORDON: The consumers might be like, "Wow!" you know? Like, "Okay, I'm not gonna shop here.”
REPORTER: California represents nearly 40 million consumers, making it one of the largest markets in the country, if not the world, and for retailers to continue to operate here, they would have to stop customizing prices on goods. Gordon hopes that could have a ripple effect on other parts of the country.
GORDON: Setting clear lines here and creating common sense protections would sort of help shape that practice, and I think would also give states a kind of a model and a blueprint that they can work from.
REPORTER: But on the last day of August, AB2564 died. It’s the second time that a bill targeting surveillance pricing wasn’t able to clear the state legislature.
Still, there’s one last thing you can do as a regular person. In 2023, California created a one-step process for deleting all of the information that data brokers have gathered about you.
FENZI: Let's see here. I am on the official website of the state of California…
REPORTER: Data brokers now have to register with the California Privacy Protection Agency, and in August, these brokers started processing requests – from regular people – to delete all personal data.
REPORTER: I just Googled “California Delete Act” to find the form, and the request form lists a bunch of stuff that I can get deleted.
FENZI: Info like my name, birthday, phone number, address, email, um, device IDs, geolocation, any biometrics like my thumbprint or my face. Political party, my hobbies, brands I like. Well this seems pretty helpful, so let's see what it takes for me to submit this request.
REPORTER: I type my name, birthday, address, email and phone number into the form.
FENZI: I guess this is all stuff they're gonna have anyways.
REPORTER: Then I have to look up ID numbers for my phone, my laptop, my smart TV, my car.
FENZI: Hopefully I'm not giving away the store here.
REPORTER: Finally, I’ve entered every electronic device I can think of.
FENZI: And, uh, it looks like in 45 to 90 days I will know whether or not data brokers in California have deleted me.
