The death of the price tag is worth mourning

🛒 Haggling isn’t a cultural quirk — for most of human history, shopping was a negotiation. What you paid depended on your bargaining skills, how wealthy you appeared, or simply the mood of the shopkeeper, according to The New York Times. In the US, this began to change in the mid-19th century when Quaker merchants, believing that charging people different amounts for the same item was immoral, began posting fixed prices at their stores. This one-price system was institutionalized in 1874, according to NPR’s Planet Money, with the practice spreading and becoming industry standard.

The price tag was revolutionary — it enabled consumers to compare prices between stores, forcing merchants to compete. It was, in essence, a democratic innovation, and that small piece of paper leveled the playing field between buyer and seller.

And now, 150 years later, that agreement is breaking down worldwide. With the rise of AI and automated surveillance, corporations are quietly dismantling the price tag system — not by removing the tags altogether, but by making the pricing on them meaningless.

The rise of algorithmic pricing: Even if you haven’t realized it, you’ve already fallen victim to dynamic pricing. It’s why Uber charges more during rush hour, why airline tickets fluctuate not just by the hour, but based on what device and which country you check from, and why the same hotel room will cost differently on the same website through your screen and your friend’s.

The infrastructure enabling this transformation is already being deployed across global retail. Electronic shelf labels — digital screens that replace traditional static price tags — are rapidly becoming standard in Western countries. While its convenience has allowed price changes that would take employees at superstores two days to implement to take effect in minutes, what makes electronic shelf labels significant isn’t just efficiency. Theoretically, stores can now change prices as they please as fast as every 10 seconds. By the time you make it to the register, the price might have already changed.

With our data firmly in the hands of Big Tech, it’s not long before surveillance pricing based on individual consumer data becomes a market standard. Companies will be able to determine how much each person can — and will — pay based on their spending habits, and more concerningly, what they’re in desperate need of. In January 2025, the US Federal Trade Commission released preliminary findings from its surveillance pricing study. The FTC found that consumer behaviors ranging from mouse movements on a webpage to products left unpurchased in an online shopping cart can be tracked and used by retailers, and that intermediary companies can help grocery stores, apparel retailers, and department stores to target prices based on the location, demographics, browsing patterns, and shopping history of consumers.

A consumer profiled as a new parent might intentionally be shown higher-priced baby thermometers if the algorithm knows your baby is sick. This can be determined through recent searches, for example. It might hike up shipping costs if it knows you’re more likely to pay for expedited delivery. As the FTC explained, instead of a price being a “static feature of a product, the same product could have a different price” based on what companies know about you.

This kind of personalized pricing isn’t new in principle — companies have long tried to determine what different customers are willing to pay. But the scale and precision of modern data collection represents something fundamentally different. In 2012, a Wall Street Journal investigation revealed that some stores’ websites displayed higher prices to shoppers in areas with fewer nearby competitors. Disturbingly, this resulted in customers in lower-income areas often seeing higher prices than those in wealthier neighborhoods.

The regulatory response is still in its early stages, and the technology continues to advance. Pricing algorithms grow more sophisticated by the day, electronic shelf labels spread, and data profiles companies build on consumers grow ever more detailed. The question facing consumers — and later, policymakers — is whether the 150-year experiment in fixed pricing will survive the algorithmic age, or whether we’re witnessing a full circle moment, this time at the discretion of an unfeeling technology instead of a friendly shopkeeper.