Could Two People Pay Different Prices for the Same Thing?


In 2025, 437 shoppers took part in an unusual pricing investigation.

They checked the same products, from the same stores, at roughly the same time, using Instacart.

You might expect them to see the same prices.

They didn't.

About 74% of the products examined had more than one price. Some had as many as five.

The largest difference for a single product was 23%.

Same product. Same store. Different price.

So when you see a price online, is everyone else seeing the same number?

One Cart, Different Prices

Consumer Reports and its partners examined Instacart pricing across several U.S. cities.

At one Safeway store in Washington, D.C., shoppers saw five different prices for the same dozen Lucerne eggs:

$3.99
$4.28
$4.59
$4.69
$4.79

In Seattle, researchers compared the same 20-item basket from the same Safeway location.

One shopper saw a total of:

$114.34

Another saw:

$123.93

A difference of $9.59 for the same basket.

Across the investigation, shopping baskets varied by about 7% on average.

But there is an important distinction.

This does not mean Instacart looked at someone's income, decided that person could afford more, and charged them a higher price.

This Was a Price Test

Instacart said the experiment used randomized price testing.

The basic idea is simple.

One group might see:

$4.29

Another:

$4.49

And another:

$4.69

The company can then measure how customers respond to different prices.

Instacart said the tests did not use personal characteristics, demographics or individual shopping behavior to decide who received a particular test price.

That matters because price testing and personalized pricing are not the same thing.

But the experiment demonstrates something important about digital shopping.

Two people can already be shown different prices for the same product at the same time.

The next question is how those prices are chosen.

What Is Personalized Pricing?

On August 19, 2026, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission proposed a new enforcement policy addressing personalized pricing.

The idea goes a step beyond randomized price testing.

A company could use information about a consumer to estimate something economists call willingness to pay.

In simple terms:

How much is this person willing to spend before walking away?

Suppose two people are looking at the same $100 product.

An algorithm predicts that Shopper A is highly price-sensitive and likely to leave if the price increases.

Shopper B appears willing to pay more.

In theory, the prices could become:

Shopper A → $100

Shopper B → $115

This is only a simplified example. It does not mean a particular retailer is currently doing this.

The important difference is that information about the customer is now part of the pricing decision.

Dynamic Pricing Is Different

We already live with prices that constantly change.

An airline has fewer seats left.

A hotel is filling up.

Demand for concert tickets suddenly jumps.

Prices rise.

This is generally called dynamic pricing.

The price changes because circumstances around the product change — demand, supply, timing, inventory or other factors.

Personalized pricing asks a different question.

Dynamic pricing asks:

"What should this cost right now?"

Personalized pricing can ask:

"What should this cost for this person?"

That difference is small in words but potentially enormous in practice.

Does Searching for a Flight Make It More Expensive?

There is a familiar internet claim:

Search for the same flight several times and the airline will see your cookies and raise the price.

Someone searches for a $500 ticket in the morning.

Later, the same flight costs $550.

It can feel personal.

But a price changing after you searched for it does not prove that the price changed because you searched for it.

Airline prices move for many reasons, including inventory, demand and booking conditions.

That distinction is important.

The price changed.

and

The price changed because of me.

are two very different claims.

A changing price alone is not evidence of personalized pricing.

What Could Companies Know About You?

Modern businesses can collect or obtain many kinds of consumer information.

Purchase history.

Browsing behavior.

Location data.

Shopping patterns.

Household information.

AI and data-analysis systems can find patterns across large amounts of this information.

That creates a powerful possibility for pricing.

Instead of asking only:

"What is the best price for this product?"

a system may eventually become better at asking:

"What is the highest price this particular customer is likely to accept?"

For businesses, knowing that number could be extremely valuable.

For consumers, it creates a very different question about what a price tag actually means.

Is Personalized Pricing Illegal?

Not necessarily.

The FTC's proposed policy does not say that every form of personalized pricing is illegal.

Different customers have received different prices in some markets for a very long time. Negotiated transactions are an obvious example.

The concern is what happens when consumers reasonably expect to see a common market price, while a business secretly uses personal information to change what each person pays.

The FTC's proposal focuses heavily on transparency.

In situations covered by the proposed policy, simply saying that a price is personalized may not be enough.

Businesses could need to explain why the price was personalized and what categories of personal information were used.

The proposal is not a final rule.

But it shows that regulators are paying attention to how consumer data could change something as basic as a price tag.

The Hard Part: You May Never Know

Walk into a physical store and see a $4.99 price tag.

Another customer standing beside you can usually see the same tag.

Online shopping is different.

Your screen shows one number.

If you see $4.79, you may simply assume that $4.79 is the price.

You cannot easily see whether someone across town is looking at $3.99 at the same moment.

That is part of what made the Instacart investigation notable.

Hundreds of shoppers had to compare prices to reveal differences that an individual shopper would have had little reason to notice.

Digital prices can be private experiences.

A Price Tag May Need a New Question

For most of history, a price tag answered a simple question:

How much does this cost?

Online commerce, consumer data and AI may add another one:

Why does it cost this much?

And if personalized pricing becomes more common, there may eventually be an even more important question:

Why does it cost this much for me?

A higher price could come from stronger demand.

It could come from lower inventory.

It could be part of a randomized pricing experiment.

Or, in a personalized pricing system, information about the customer could become part of the calculation.

The numbers on the screen may look exactly the same.

How those numbers were created may matter just as much as the price itself.

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