Consumer Advocate Lindsay Owens | This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von #693

This Past Weekend #693 - Lindsay Owens brings the pricing research, and Theo somehow gets from grocery experiments to sour cream and onion batteries. 1. Announcing Gouged apparently changed Lindsay's invitations. She says lobbyists she had not spoken to in years started offering celebratory drinks. When she looked up where they worked, she found companies discussed in her book. The congratulatory messages suddenly looked different. 2. Her grocery investigation has a concrete setup: 400 volunteer shoppers, the same 23 items, and comparisons at the same store and time. Lindsay says 75% of the items showed different prices across shoppers, with differences reaching 23%. She also describes Instacart backing away from the testing afterward. Those are the study results and follow-up as she reports them here. 3. Skimpflation gives Theo a very personal objection. Lindsay explains the idea of keeping the price while cutting product quality, and Theo remembers stretching things with water at home. His complaint is that companies have taken over the customers' old trick: at least let us do the diluting ourselves. 4. The Savannah Bananas become the counterexample to selling every scarce ticket to the highest bidder. Lindsay describes fixed prices and a lottery when too many people want seats. Her point is about who gets a chance to attend, rather than pretending everyone can get a ticket. 5. Theo's imaginary end-cap aisle deserves its own store: barbecue-flavored napkins, sour cream and onion batteries, and pomegranate slippers. A discussion about retail design turns into a whole line of products that absolutely should not exist. 6. The Walmart exchange has an important distinction: patents and deployed systems are different things. Theo reads the company's denial that it uses or will use personal information to set individualized prices. Lindsay challenges what the patents could enable and calls for more transparency. The episode presents a dispute, not proof that every patented idea is operating in stores. 7. A reported 515-page McDonald's data file becomes an unexpectedly affectionate moment. While they read about a reporter's shopping records, Theo jokes that receiving that much attention almost feels like a Valentine: somebody cares. That is quite a response to a data dossier. 8. Lindsay's closing proposal is a 12-part Shoppers Bill of Rights. The examples are deliberately everyday things: straightforward refunds, the full price before checkout, and protections against using personal data to raise someone's price. These are changes she wants, rather than a list of laws already in force. Theo also asks to put Gouged on the studio shelf. Conversation timestamps 00:40 - The conversation begins 16:03 - The book announcement and lobbyist invitations 23:44 - The grocery experiment 35:19 - Shrinkflation, skimpflation and the watering-down joke 42:38 - The Savannah Bananas ticket model 53:01 - Theo's imaginary end-cap products 1:01:48 - Reading Walmart's response letter 1:20:51 - The reported McDonald's data file 1:41:30 - The proposed Shoppers Bill of Rights 1:52:08 - Gouged for the studio shelf Which moment stuck with you: the grocery experiment, the imaginary products, or the 515-page Valentine?