In Instacart’s response, they said that these pricing experiments were based purely on behavioral data - not on personal or demographic information. Or in other words, they aren’t looking at who you are, “just” what you’re doing.

Andy Warhol once wrote about American culture: 

What's great about this country is America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest.

You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you can know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too.

A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good.

From The Philosophy of Andy Warhol

Yesterday, we all drank the same Cokes. But today, we scroll hyper-personalized social media feeds, tailored to our so-called revealed preferences. And tomorrow, maybe we’ll pay wildly-different prices for that same can of Coke (and not because you’re Liz Taylor, but because you spend like she does). It’s one more change that fragments our common experiences into isolated silos. 

Economically, is this an issue? I don’t really know; if Lucille Bluth is willing to pay $10 for a banana, maybe we should let her - and the shop and platform can split the profits from whatever pricing scheme can make that happen. It’s the invisible hand at work. 

It still gives me the ick. It makes me feel like the business is trying to shrink my “consumer surplus” until I pay a perfect, maximized-for-me price. It makes me feel like an adversary, not a customer, and it makes me feel like I should be a worse person to get a better price. 

Is it just a cultural difference? As a kid visiting China, I once bought a Gameboy game from a nice lady at the electronics bazaar, a great deal at under $10, or so I thought. Later, I got scolded because I didn’t try to haggle: Remember, the first price they offer is just a starting point to negotiate.

I think this new price discrimination - of abandoned carts, the cancellation song-and-dance, and customers segmented down to individuals - is different. The social expectations are flipped: I don’t think the average person knows that haggling is even an option, nor what factors contribute to personalized pricing. 

Only a dummy like me goes to the bazaar without haggling. But today, you probably don’t try to abandon every cart, or switch apps in a way that’s easily-identifiable as comparison shopping, or only buy things that indicate you’re a regular person instead of a fancy rich person. You might let mistakes slide instead of filing a complaint or blasting a company in a Yelp review. All of those events (and who knows which exactly?) are potentially recorded and fed back into your personalized price.

In the future, it’ll be a quiet trick to cultivate your digital reputation of being picky, so you can get the lowest prices and the best treatment. You might even resell that access to someone who wasn’t so careful; or equally likely, spiral into superstitious practice since opaque pricing means you never really know what happened.

On the flip side, we might see the “most favored customer” clause make its way from B2B to consumer contexts - an explicit admission that “the customer is king” is dead. It’ll be an arms race, with data-crunchers looking for opportunities to raise prices while we posture about where we really draw the line. 

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I recently got a kick out of the whimsical CAPTCHA Welcome Mat, a site where you have to prove your humanity before you’re allowed to buy the product. In the bonus round, you get to haggle with a chatbot to earn a coupon for 10% off.