My take on this isn't directly related to the surveillance side of it, but from what I can tell we used to have this model:

Most stores and restaurant chains had normal prices, and sale/special prices. You could coupon like mad and save some serious money by going around to a bunch of different places, with them probably losing money on many of those transactions as long as you were disciplined and didn't buy non-couponed items, but it was a ton of work.

(Another model was to have had fake, way-too-high [like, double what they should be] full prices, but 2/3 of those kinds of stores were always "on sale" at what should be the normal price anyway. A disgusting psychological trick and tacit lie that we probably should have found some way to effectively crack down on, but pretty easy to spot and it was no big deal to avoid the places that did this, especially since most of them sold crappy goods anyway. This model's still around, I'm just not really concerned with it here and mentioning it as an aside to acknowledge that it existed, and exists)

Now we have this model:

A very-few stores and restaurant chains still follow the old model, but most now have batshit crazy "normal" prices, require an app (so, spying) and shopping specials to get what should be the normal prices, and then sometimes you do still get an actual bargain.

The net result is that if you just want reasonable fucking baseline prices and not to be gouged, you now have to spend more time and attention than before.

I'm convinced this is a big part of why there's a perception that inflation is even worse than official measurements say it is. I can say it's a major contributing factor to it feeling like our financial situation is worse than it was six years ago, despite making quite a bit more money now. We were finally at a point where we didn't really need to pay attention to sales and such at most normal stores, just didn't matter enough to us to save an extra couple bucks and we could finally relax a little when shopping, like pay attention to which interchangeable thing was cheaper and maybe grab things if we saw a sale but we didn't need to structure our grocery lists around deals. Now? They've price-discriminated via attention and allowing-tracking (those damn apps) so much that we have to pay lots of attention and have their damn advertising prodding us all the time (the apps) again just to not get entirely screwed every time we go to a store. We feel poorer again.

In short, I think a somewhat-obscure online rant-song about Taco Bell contains more insight about how normal people are experiencing the US economy since Covid, than most serious economic reporting does.

Lyrics:

https://genius.com/Jeff-heiny-deserving-taco-bell-rant-lyric...

Song, such as it is (warning: lo-fi screamo, more or less):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2g0coPaZWi4

user:	clarance
created:	July 29, 2026
karma:	2