Gouged

Landlords are using software to band together and organise artificial rent hikes. Uber is spiking the price of rides when your phone's about to die. And without drivers' knowledge, car companies are installing software that reports your driving behaviour to insurance companies, so they can collude against you on insurance prices. Instead of merely driving down costs, companies are now laser-focused on boosting revenue by wringing as much out of consumers as possible, bringing in record profits as a result. Price hikes are old as dirt, but today's companies have reinvented them, using a dizzying array of sophisticated and deceitful tricks to do something pretty darn simple: rip you off. In Gouged, Lindsay Owens takes you inside the corporate boardrooms where pricing decisions are made, uncovering the techniques - from junk fees and shrinkflation to algorithmic collusion - that corporations use to jack up prices. But if there's one thing we have in common, it's that we are all consumers. It's time to fight back.