The New Frontier in Price Discrimination

AI is here to help you shop, and Google is ready to make sure you pay top dollar for all the things you need.

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This week Matt and David talk with pricing expert Lindsay Owens, Executive Director of Groundwork Collaborative, about Google's plan to turn its Gemini AI into your personal shopping assistant. It sounds convenient until you realize it's actually a massive surveillance pricing operation. Google just announced partnerships with Walmart, Visa, MasterCard, and others to use everything they know about you (emails, photos, calendar, searches) to help retailers personalize prices and steer you toward higher-priced products. Lindsay, who went viral calling this out on Twitter, explains how Google's own reply basically admitted they "restrain price," a pretty wild admission for a company facing antitrust lawsuits. It's a sobering conversation about how AI shopping could turbocharge price discrimination, why major retailers are handing over their pricing power to Google, and whether we can stop this before it's too late.

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