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Call your senator. Surveillance pricing should be illegal.

Or, at a bare minimum, occurrences must be disclosed, otherwise they're basically defrauding the customer.

Secret pricing also destroys any semblance of efficient markets, so any ardent (but honest) free-marketeers should be against it too.

Aren't coupons the standard age-old price discrimination method?

At least in the scope of living memory, sure, but the key is that the prices are not secret, personalized, or—even worse—both secret and personalized.

How sure are we that "digital" coupons aren't personalized? And even printed coupons in mailers could have been customized. To a personal level, or to a neighbor hood, or zip code level. If Instagram had sent out individualized coupons, would that be better?

If only calling "representatives" still worked nowadays in the age of blatant corporate lobbying... it's really hard not to completely despair, because is there _anything_ we peons can do?

(I used to call my senators and house reps about things, but it never got more than a polite "thanks, but I don't care" and now they don't even bother to reply at all)

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