Imagine you and four friends open Instacart.

Same Safeway.

Same time.

Same dozen eggs.

You see:

Your friends see:

That isn't a hypothetical.

Researchers actually found those five prices for the exact same dozen Lucerne eggs at the same Safeway in Washington, D.C. during an Instacart pricing experiment.

Apparently the price of eggs needed a personality test.

Because we normally think of a price as a fact.

Milk costs $4.

Cereal costs $6.

You can like the price.

You can hate the price.

But presumably the person standing next to you sees the same number.

Online, that assumption is getting shakier.

Consumer Reports, Groundwork Collaborative and More Perfect Union recruited 437 shoppers across four U.S. cities to shop for the same groceries at roughly the same time.

They found 74% of the grocery items tested appeared at multiple prices.

Some individual items were shown at prices up to 23% apart, and total baskets differed by about 7% on average.

At one Seattle Safeway, the exact same basket was shown to different shoppers for:

$114.34

$119.85

and

$123.93.

Same groceries.

Same store.

Same time.

Different checkout.

Instacart had a tool called Eversight that allowed some retail partners to run online pricing experiments.

The idea is basically:

Show one group Price A.

Show another group Price B.

See what happens.

Learn how sensitive shoppers are to the price.

Repeat.

Instacart said only 10 U.S. retail partners were running these tests, and that they were randomized — not based on someone's demographics, shopping history or individual behaviour. It also said the experiments weren't real-time dynamic pricing and weren't designed to increase a retailer's average markup.

So this wasn't:

It was closer to:

Retailers have experimented with prices forever.

The internet just gave the experiment a fairly important upgrade:

the shoppers don't have to know they're in it.

The grocery aisle has discovered A/B testing.

The research caused enough backlash that in December 2025, Instacart announced it was ending all item-price tests on its platform. Retailers could no longer use Eversight to run them.

A few weeks later, New York's attorney general demanded more information, citing the study's finding that shoppers were being shown substantially different prices for identical products.

So the five-price eggs are not something Instacart says it is still doing today.

But they revealed a much bigger question.

Here's where it gets stranger.

Instacart says its tests were randomized.

The price wasn't being chosen because the system knew you.

There is another kind of pricing where that distinction disappears.

It's called personalized pricing.

On August 19, 2026, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission proposed an enforcement policy specifically addressing it.

The FTC defines personalized pricing as using someone's personal data to set a price based on how much a company believes that individual is willing to spend.

Things like your web-surfing habits or buying history can potentially become part of the equation. The FTC warned that companies may violate consumer-protection laws if they secretly use personal data this way while making a price appear ordinary.

So there are three increasingly weird worlds:

Dynamic pricing

Price testing

Personalized pricing

That last one turns the price tag into something completely different.

For most of retail history, the price tag answered one question:

Price experimentation adds another:

Personalized pricing can go one step further:

That's a very different relationship.

Once upon a time, you looked at the price tag.

Now the technology exists for...

the price tag to look back.

The monkey is asking everyone in the group chat what their eggs cost.