In December 2025, a Consumer Reports investigation found that the food delivery platform Instacart was conducting a pricing experiment. Using artificial intelligence (AI), Instacart charged shoppers different prices for the same items to see how much different people were willing to pay. Consumer Reports projected that the price swings it saw could amount to some families paying as much as $1200 more for groceries in a year. (In the wake of the investigation, Instacart stopped its AI pricing experiments.)

At a time of rising food prices and cruel Trump policies that take food out of the mouths of children and families, this kind of experimentation is a slap in the face. It’s also a smoking gun for a new era of corporate greed.

With the power of digital technology, data collection, and AI, corporations can pursue new pricing strategies to squeeze even more profits from us. The data centers powering the AI boom aren’t just raising our electricity bills, polluting our air, worsening climate change, and guzzling our water. They’re also helping corporations drive prices as high as they can get away with.

Personalized Prices Are the Newest Frontier for Corporate Greed

Imagine you’re on your way home late from work, in a hurry to buy a cake for your kid’s birthday. You check your favorite grocery store’s app and see one on sale for $19.99, marked down from $25.99. Score! You tap “purchase for pick-up” and head out.

What you don’t know is that the cake was $17.99 in-store. And based on all the information the store has gleaned from your shopping history and app usage, an algorithm inferred it was a special occasion (you haven’t bought a cake in months), you’re in a hurry (you logged in twice as fast as usual), and that you can’t resist a sale bigger than 20%. In a flash, the algorithm displayed the $19.99 sale price.

This sounds like a dystopia, but it’s closer to reality than ever. Every time we swipe a card, click “buy now,” or add something to our carts, we’re sharing information about ourselves that corporations hoard. Corporations can then feed this information into mathematical models that predict our interests, preferences, and behavior — including what we’ll buy, when, and for what price. 

How Corporations Mine Our Data for Profit

Kroger isn’t just the second-largest grocery store in the country. It’s also a data collection business, amassing a treasure trove of personal information and shopping habits for 62 million households nationwide. Kroger collects and infers information about loyalty card members including their addresses, shopping histories, ethnicities, education levels, and more. It then uses this information to tailor the discounts it offers to individual customers. 

Along with benefiting its own in-store sales, Kroger sells customer data and “insights” to a host of food corporations — including General Mills, Coca-Cola, and Kraft Heinz — to inform those corporations’ marketing. This side of Kroger’s business has now become an estimated $500-million source of profits. 

Kroger isn’t alone in this. Walmart, Target, and Albertsons, as well as delivery apps like DoorDash, Instacart, and Gopuff, all use the data they collect to sell ads targeted for shoppers most likely to purchase an item. 

While Kroger says it doesn’t use customer data to personalize prices, only discount offers, the Instacart AI pricing experiment shows that personalized prices based on our data aren’t too far from the future. We’re heading into a world where our every digital move is tracked, sold, and then used to extract more profits from us. 

AI and Digital Price Tags Promise Faster “Dynamic” Pricing

While corporations work toward personalized prices, digital price tags are allowing them to change prices on the shelves at the drop of a hat. Kroger, Whole Foods, and Walmart (the biggest grocery retailer in the country) are rolling out digital price tags. These allow employees to update prices with an app in seconds, instead of swapping out paper tags by hand, which can take days.

This, combined with AI, enables a whole new level and scale of dynamic prices; that is, changing prices in real-time as markets change. On hotter days, we may see ice cream prices rise in a blink on a store’s digital price tag. During the post-work grocery store rush, prices for microwave meals may spike. Already, in 2024, fast food chain Wendy’s faced public outcry when it announced plans to introduce dynamic pricing, offering different prices at different times of day.

Now, AI models can use an incredible range of data, including competitor pricing and geography, to inform prices with mathematical efficiency. “Using this information, the model determines the optimal price for each product to maximize revenue or profit,” says a founder of BetterBasket, an AI pricing company. And with digital price tags, those optimal prices can be updated on shelves near-instantaneously.

AI Prices, Profits, and Corporate Power

While companies have insisted that they’re using these technologies to offer “more relevant” coupons to customers, we know the truth. This is about profit. During Consumer Reports’ investigation, Instacart revealed a pricing strategy to maximize profits by showing higher prices to shoppers who are more willing to pay for that item. Instacart even boasted that its pricing software can boost profits from each additional sale by 2 to 5%. 

These predatory uses of emerging technologies are unconscionable at a time of sky-high corporate profits, while millions of families struggle to put food on the table. But they’re made possible by the unbridled growth in corporate power. 

Already, corporations have enormous ability to set the prices we pay for basic needs like food. That’s because only a handful of companies dominate most corners of the economy, including the grocery market. This gives them massive leverage to call the shots on everything from working conditions to environmental practices to the prices we pay.

Meanwhile, Big Tech has invaded every corner of our lives to the point where no digital move we make goes untracked. Now, the artificial intelligence boom will help entrench the industry’s strength and enable even more insidious and profitable pricing strategies.

Thanks to decades of policy that let corporate greed grow unrestrained, we see a vicious cycle: Companies devour more profits, which gives them more power to squeeze out or buy the competition, which give them more power to further dominate industries and seize even more profits. 

Our leaders must pass policies that rein in corporate reach, consolidation, power, and greed throughout our economy. That includes regulations on the AI industry, an immediate stop to the new data centers fueling it, and a stop to AI-driven individualized pricing.