In the Tier of the Beholder
The price is right — just not the same price for everyone
The Janky Time Machine’s chronometer developed what the repair manual calls “temporal drift clustering” — which means it keeps landing me in grocery stores. Three times this month. This one is a midsize chain, the kind where the signage has quietly started doing more work than it used to.
Somewhere along the way, “same price for everyone” stopped being the default and became a pledge. A label. A color-coded opt-in that requires its own fine print. The fact that a store needs to advertise this — to distinguish itself from what’s around it — tells you everything about what’s around it.
Later, a kitchen counter. A receipt left out. Normal groceries, normal itemized list, and then the bottom third: a shaded box, required by law, showing the gap between the shelf price and your price. Pasta sauce. Protein bar. Factors: purchase frequency, device class, location. Year to date: $214.40.
That number is the system working as intended1. Not a glitch, not a leak — a feature. A legislature decided that if you’re going to be priced by your profile, you at least get to see the invoice. Transparency as a form of closure. The machine is visible now; that’s supposed to make it fine.
The odd thing isn’t the $214. It’s that the receipt is just sitting there, unremarkable, next to the keys and the mail. The Janky Time Machine is outside leaking temporal coolant on the asphalt — the repair manual calls this “phase variance bleed,” which I’ve stopped questioning — and in here, a number that would have caused a scandal a few years back is just a line item.
Nobody decided to be okay with it. It just got a disclosure box.
We have reached peak late stage capitalism. “seeing how much the consumer will endure” is a rapacious business strategy - https://www.ctvnews.ca/business/article/what-is-surveillance-pricing-how-algorithms-affect-the-price-you-pay/