This week on our live show, David Dayen talks to The Capital Forum’s antitrust correspondent and former Prospect intern Jarod Facundo about grocery pricing: how all the pricing strategies we’ve reported on in our June special issue—junk fees, price-fixing, shrinkflation, personalization, and data collection—come together at the grocery store. Every product’s placement, every advertisement, every coupon is a function of marketing wizardry and hardball tactics, in a bid for the eyes and wallets of consumers.
Because everyone needs food to survive, customers are a captive market. Shoppers have no choice but to act as the guinea pig as retailers and manufacturers try every pricing strategy in the book, to boost profits and squeeze as much as possible out of consumers. Big Data has only made this worse, concentrating power in the hands of a few corporations and shifting the business models of grocers from earning revenue through retail sales to profiting off of selling consumer data.
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