Gouged: Why Americans Are Being Ripped Off – and What to Do About It

Repeat after me: it’s not my fault, it’s not my fault, it’s not my fault.” That’s the message to frustrated US shoppers in Gouged: The End of a Fair Price – and What That Means for Your Wallet by Lindsay Owens, economic sociologist and head of the Groundwork Collaborative, a progressive Washington thinktank.

Consumer rage is rising and no wonder – we are all living through the “reinvention of the rip-off”, Owens told the Guardian, an experience that is undermining Americans’ trust in the economy. Nothing short of a consumer uprising and a slate of tough new rules is going to fix the problem, she believes.

The book concludes with a “shoppers’ bill of rights” that lays out how local and federal governments could write rules to fix the problem: ban companies from using shared software to coordinate prices, it urges, and require AI “shopping assistants” to act in consumers’ best interest, not steer them to higher-price items, among other moves.