Neil Freiman

But what the consumer was shown was how much they were discounting it.

And they wanted to see how our minds, our little shopping brain minds would react to that.

And that just reminded me how manipulative these things are.

And it's something that we've accepted in certain domains and certain industries.

When you log on to Amtrak or to buy a flight ticket, you know that they're doing variable pricing and you don't quite understand how it works, but it's just been going on for decades and you just accept that.

But now it's moving into different domains.

I remember

Last year, Wendy's said it was going to do variable pricing at its stores.

There was a huge backlash to that, and the next day they backtracked.

Delta, also in an industry that we've come to accept variable pricing for, said it was going to use AI to develop personalized pricing.

That's a distinction we should make.

There's algorithmic pricing, and then there's personalized pricing.

Personalized pricing looks at your shopping history or where you live, your zip code, your income, and then makes a price specifically

catered to you.

They had to backtrack from that.

So a lot of these companies that say they're getting into this are going to do it quietly because when they publicly announce it, they face a lot of outrage from consumers.

Let's give Instacart the last word here.

They did respond to this Consumer Reports testing report, and they said, just as retailers have long tested prices in their physical stores to better understand consumer preferences, a subset of only 10 retail partners, one that already apply markups, do the same online via Instacart.

They said these tests were limited, short-term, and randomized, but they did pull the test from Target and Costco once they contacted them about these experiments.

Just to give you some perspective, when Google IPO in 2004, it was worth $23 billion.