Same Store. Same Moment. Five Different Prices for One Carton of Eggs.

You suspected the price on your screen wasn't the price everyone else gets. You were right, and there's something you can do about it tonight.

By the Antipriced Investigations Desk. June 17, 2026.

The short version:

• A 2025 investigation caught a single grocery item selling at five different prices at the same store at the same time.

• No sale. No coupon. Just different shoppers.

• This isn't new. Amazon got caught doing a version of it back in 2000.

• The trick is guessing the most you, specifically, will pay. The twist nobody mentions is that most people pay less. The machine just hunts for the ones who will pay more.

• You can't fully hide. But you can starve it: Global Privacy Control, a tracker blocker, and comparing big purchases across devices.

What is surveillance pricing?

Surveillance pricing is when a company uses your personal data, things like your location, your device, your purchase history, even your behavior, to guess the most you personally will pay, and then sets your price right there. You will also see it called personalized or individualized pricing. It is not the same thing as dynamic pricing, where the price moves with time or demand but stays the same for everyone in that moment.

You're not crazy. Here's the carton of eggs.

In 2025, researchers watched one carton of Lucerne eggs at a Washington, D.C. Safeway sell at five different prices: $3.99, $4.28, $4.59, $4.69, and $4.79. Same store, same moment, different shoppers.

No coupon. No flash sale. The only thing that changed was who was looking at the screen.

That was Instacart, using a pricing engine it owns called Eversight, documented by Consumer Reports along with Groundwork Collaborative and More Perfect Union in December 2025. That one is proven. Instacart admitted the tests and shut them down. Across the investigation, about three-quarters of the items checked came up at different prices, running as much as 23 percent apart, at the same store at the same time.

Instacart's defense? It calls them "randomized tests." Hold onto that word. We will set it next to those eggs in a minute.

They're not pricing the eggs. They're pricing you.

The trick isn't really about the product. It is about guessing the most you will pay, your "willingness to pay" in the trade, and quietly parking the number right there. The machine is hunting for your pain point, the most you will hand over before you balk.

How does it guess? From the signals you give off without thinking: your location, your device, what you bought last time, your loyalty card, even the way you move around the page.

How personal does that get? In 2016, Uber's own head of economic research, Keith Chen, told NPR's Hidden Brain that one of the strongest predictors you will accept a surge price is a nearly dead phone battery, because someone scrambling to get home doesn't shop around. Then he added the line worth framing: "we absolutely don't use that." (Admitted as a predictor. Uber says it doesn't actually use it. Believe what you like.)

Now for the part that separates us from every breathless "they're watching you" page on the internet. Most people pay less under this stuff, not more.

A 2023 study in the Journal of Political Economy, by economists Jean-Pierre Dubé and Sanjog Misra, found that personalized pricing raised one company's profit by about 19 percent, on top of its best one-price-for-everyone price, while more than 60 percent of customers paid less.

Read that twice. The machine isn't trying to gouge everyone. It is trying to find the specific people who will quietly pay more, and on the wrong night, with the wrong battery, that person is you. Lawmakers in both parties have finally started asking questions.

This isn't new. It's 25 years old. Here are the receipts.

Hardest evidence first.

The Princeton Review, 2015. ProPublica reporters Julia Angwin, Surya Mattu, and Jeff Larson found the company's online SAT-prep course priced anywhere from $6,600 to $8,400 for the exact same course, based on your zip code. The gut-punch: Asian families were 1.8 times more likely to get the higher price, no matter their income. The caveat that matters, because it does: that racial gap is a documented correlation, not proven intent. The company says it comes down to "business costs" and local competition. We name the pattern. We don't claim to read their minds.

Staples, 2012. The Wall Street Journal's "What They Know" series caught Staples.com showing the same stapler at $15.79 to one shopper and $14.29 to another, based on your zip code and how close you lived to a rival store. The quietly brutal part: remote areas, which skew lower-income, tended to pay more. The same series caught Home Depot, Discover, and Rosetta Stone doing it too.

Amazon, 2000. The original sin. Amazon showed different customers different prices on the same DVDs, got caught when shoppers compared notes online, and ended up refunding 6,896 of them an average of $3.10 each. Founder Jeff Bezos said it plainly: "We're sorry we did it." Proven, though Amazon swore the prices weren't about who you were, calling the whole thing "random."

Twenty-five years, the same move. The only thing that changed is that the tools got a lot better.

Watch them brag to investors, then deny it to you.

This is the part that should make you laugh, and then check your blood pressure.

Delta. On investor calls in 2024 and 2025, president Glen Hauenstein talked up AI that would set a fare "available to you the individual," run by what he called "a super analyst" working around the clock. Then, when senators asked, Delta said it does no individualized pricing based on personal data, period. That one is an allegation, and Delta flatly denies it. We're not calling it a crime. We're pointing at the daylight between what they tell Wall Street and what they tell you.

JetBlue. In 2026, a customer watched a fare jump $230 overnight and complained. JetBlue's advice? "Clear your cache and cookies." The airline is now being sued over its pricing. The case, Phillips v. JetBlue, was filed in federal court in April 2026. That is an allegation too, and JetBlue, like any defendant, is fighting it. But sit with the tell for a second: the official fix for a price you hate is to erase the trail of who you are.

Which brings us back to the eggs. Instacart says the tests were "short-term, randomized A/B pricing experiments" that "were never based on supply or demand, personal data, demographics, or individual shopping behavior." You're a smart adult. Set "totally random" next to one carton at five prices, same store, same moment, and call it yourself.

The absurd part was never that they do it. It is that they have decided charging you your personal maximum is a feature worth bragging about.

What to actually do tonight (and what's a waste of your time).

The part no one selling you a VPN subscription will admit: you can't fully hide. But you can make yourself a much worse target. Ranked by what actually works.

The thing that mostly doesn't is incognito mode. For pricing, it is close to theater. It clears the cookies on your device, but it does nothing about your location, your account, or your device's fingerprint. A University of Chicago study found that people wildly overestimate what it does. Use it if you like. Just don't trust it to save you a cent.

1. Turn on Global Privacy Control, then add a tracker blocker. Global Privacy Control is a setting that tells every website "don't sell or share my data," and in California, Colorado, and Connecticut, companies are legally required to honor it. Pair it with a free blocker like uBlock Origin or Privacy Badger, which kills the tracking scripts before they load. Set it once. It starves the machine at the source.

2. Opt out of the data brokers. These are the companies quietly buying and selling your profile. If you live in California, the new DROP tool deletes you from more than 500 of them with a single request. Everywhere else, opt out by hand. A 2024 Consumer Reports test cleared about 70 percent of profiles within four months.

3. Comparison-shop the big stuff on more than one screen. Before a flight or a major purchase, check the price logged out, on a different device, or on a friend's phone. If the numbers don't match, you have caught them. (For travel, a VPN that moves your apparent location can sometimes move the price, though don't bank on it.)

4. Stop shopping logged in by default. The less a site can tie tonight's visit to your whole history, the dumber its guess about your pain point.

The bottom line: the real fix here isn't a browser setting. It is the law catching up, which is finally starting to happen. Until it does, these moves shrink tonight's exposure.

You were right.

You suspected the price on your screen wasn't the price everyone else gets. Now you have the receipt: one carton of eggs at five prices, same store, same moment, with a 25-year paper trail running right behind it.

So screenshot the eggs. Send them to the friend who told you that you were being paranoid. Then flip on Global Privacy Control before you buy anything else tonight.

Quick questions, answered.

Is surveillance pricing legal in the United States?

Mostly, yes. There is no federal ban as of 2026. New York now requires companies to disclose when a price is set by an algorithm using your personal data, and a handful of states have passed or proposed outright bans, but in most of the country it is currently legal. What is illegal: using protected characteristics like race, or collecting your data without the consent the law requires.

How do I know if I'm being charged more than other people?

You usually can't see it directly, which is the point. The tell-tale check is to load the same item logged out, on a second device, or on a friend's phone. If the price changes, you have caught personalized pricing in the act. Do this especially before flights and big-ticket buys.

Does incognito mode make prices cheaper?

Barely, if at all. Incognito clears the cookies on your device, but it doesn't hide your location, your account, or your device fingerprint, so it does little against pricing. The more effective move is a tracker blocker plus Global Privacy Control.

Did Instacart actually charge different prices for the same groceries?

A December 2025 investigation by Consumer Reports, Groundwork Collaborative, and More Perfect Union found that about three-quarters of the products checked were offered at different prices, with gaps up to 23 percent at the same store at the same time. Instacart says the tests were short-term, randomized experiments "never based on supply or demand, personal data, demographics, or individual shopping behavior," and it ended the program in December 2025.

What's the single best thing I can do about it?

Turn on Global Privacy Control and install a tracker blocker like uBlock Origin or Privacy Badger. It is set-once, it is free, and in several states companies are legally required to honor the signal, so it cuts the data supply that surveillance pricing runs on.

Antipriced takes no money from the companies it investigates. No ads from them, no sponsorships, no affiliate deals on the products we scrutinize. Reader-supported, on your side.