Gouged: why Americans are being ripped off – and what to do about it

Close-up of a hand with jade and brown bracelets inserting a credit card into a payment terminal at a store checkout. Photograph: Julia Kozlov/Getty ImagesView image in fullscreenClose-up of a hand with jade and brown bracelets inserting a credit card into a payment terminal at a store checkout. Photograph: Julia Kozlov/Getty ImagesConsumedUS economyGouged: why Americans are being ripped off – and what to do about itHow can we fix our pricing crisis? Economic sociologist Lindsay Owens urges tough new rules – and a consumer uprising

“Repeat after me: it’s not my fault, it’s not my fault, it’s not my fault.” That’s the message to frustrated US shoppers in Gouged: The End of a Fair Price – and What That Means for Your Wallet by Lindsay Owens, economic sociologist and head of the Groundwork Collaborative, a progressive Washington thinktank.

Consumer rage is rising and no wonder – we are all living through the “reinvention of the rip-off”, Owens told the Guardian, an experience that is undermining Americans’ trust in the economy. Nothing short of a consumer uprising and a slate of tough new rules is going to fix the problem, she believes.

The book concludes with a “shoppers’ bill of rights” that lays out how local and federal governments could write rules to fix the problem: ban companies from using shared software to coordinate prices, it urges, and require AI “shopping assistants” to act in consumers’ best interest, not steer them to higher-price items, among other moves.

“A cost of living crisis is the right time to build the constituency for a revived consumer movement in this country,” Owens says.

The following interview was compiled from several conversations and edited and condensed for clarity.

Right around the time that America started experiencing rising inflation and cost of living in 2021, I started to realize that there was something else going on besides just high prices. The way companies were talking about pricing was starting to shift.

Their costs were going up but they weren’t too worried about it. They were planning to pass all of their rising costs along to us, and they were pretty bullish about gilding the lily and going for more.

I started to see a little bit of a breadcrumb trail: “Oh, these companies are bullish because they have a plan for this, right?” They have some new techniques and technologies they’re planning to deploy, they have some new partnerships, they’ve been buying up AI pricing companies … they were ready for this moment.

What actually changed inside corporate boardrooms? Cost-cutting hit bone. I cut my teeth in academia and the Senate studying the ruthless form of American capitalism that’s centered around it: bust unions and keep wages down, pass Nafta and outsource labor, bring in the bean counters from the big four accounting firms and ask: “How do we limit our regulatory costs?”

But there’s been a shift toward the revenue side of the ledger that includes getting better on price hiking. That’s easier to do when there’s less competition, but it’s also the result of new technologies.

Gouged details data-mining companies unknown to the average consumer, like EverSight, Kronos, Plexure. How important have they been to the “gouging” problem US consumers are facing?