Dynamic pricing used to raise costs of everything from food and Uber rides to museum visits

If you feel like you’re being nickel-and-dimed everywhere you shop – you probably are.Instacart has been using a shady AI algorithm that charges different prices to different customers on the same grocery items in the same stores without telling them, according to an explosive study released by Consumer Reports and Groundwork Collaborative earlier this week.At a Target store in North Canton, Ohio, for example, the popular grocery app charged one customer $2.99 for Skippy Creamy Peanut Butter – while other Instacart users paid as much as $3.59 for the same jar picked up from the same location, the study found.But it’s not just Instacart using cutting-edge tech to set higher prices.So-called “dynamic pricing” practices have been used by rideshares Uber and Lyft; Las Vegas convenience stores; children’s museums and zoos; and even your local grocery stores.Whole Foods, Amazon Fresh and Kroger have already rolled out electronic price tags that allow workers to raise shelf prices in a matter of minutes.

Walmart has said it’s planning to add the tags to thousands of stores by 2026.Variable pricing is nothing new, but artificial intelligence has made it easier for companies of all sizes to leverage dynamic pricing – and “when something is easier to use, it becomes easy also to take advantage of,” said Pascal Yammine, CEO at Zilliant, an AI-driven pricing strategy firm.Wendy’s faced heated backlash last year over its plans to invest $20 million in digital menu boards that could change the price of a Dave’s burger in real time – but it quickly walked back the comments, saying it “will not implement surge pricing … We didn’t use that phrase.”While businesses have always adjusted prices to find the highest amount a customer will fork over, now artificial intelligence, advanced algorithms and massive troves of user data are allowing companies to be more exacting than ever.“The problem isn’t that companies across multiple industries are us...