Money, in brief

Nearly 200 volunteers checked prices on 20 grocery items on Instacart in four US cities. [1]

At one Safeway in Washington DC they picked the same eggs at the same moment. Some were offered $3.99. Some were offered $4.79. [1]

The same test found Skippy peanut butter at $2.99 or $3.59 in an Ohio Target, and Wheat Thins at $3.99 or $4.89 in a Seattle Safeway. [1]

Charging each buyer the most they will pay is called first-degree price discrimination, and it is only possible when the seller knows the buyer. [2]

It is not the same as prices that move for everyone at once. A European Parliament study defines the personal kind as different prices for identical things at the same time, based on what the seller knows about the customer. [14]

Online the seller knows a great deal about the buyer, and the buyer knows almost nothing about how the price was set. Brookings calls that a one-sided bargaining situation. [11]

The US Federal Trade Commission studied the practice in January 2025 and found retailers using precise location, shopping history, demographics and browsing history to set prices. Its then-chair Lina Khan said the tailoring went down to a person's mouse movements on a webpage. [3]

The tracking is not only online. Shops use cameras and Bluetooth signals from your phone to see how long you linger and what you look at. [3]

Maryland became the first US state to ban it in groceries. The law was signed in April, takes effect on 1 October, and carries fines of $10,000, rising to $25,000 for repeats. [4][5]

The Maryland law bans raising a price with personal data. It does not stop lowering one. A shop can raise its prices for everyone and then hand out individual discounts, says Tom McBrien of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. [4]

Colorado's bill went further and covered wages as well as prices. Governor Jared Polis vetoed it in June, saying it would punish differentially lower prices, not just higher ones. It was his second veto of a bill like it in twelve months. [6]

JetBlue is facing a proposed class action in Brooklyn federal court. It followed a public reply telling a passenger flying to a funeral to try clearing their cache and cookies. JetBlue says it does not use personal data or artificial intelligence to set fares. [7]

None of this is needed for the oldest version. In Peckham, south London, low-income households pay an average of £493 a year more than wealthier ones for identical goods, and over £600 in the worst-hit parts of the capital. [8]

The gap is built from ordinary charges. Prepayment meter users pay £129 a year more than direct-debit customers. Drivers in deprived postcodes pay £153 more for motor insurance. Food is the single largest driver, because 39% of affected families shop at convenience stores rather than supermarkets. [8]

Insurers have a term for the same idea. Price optimisation works out the highest price a customer will tolerate before they switch. [9]

Why it matters. Watch whether any large retailer is ever shown setting a different starting price by shopper. Every company asked so far says it does not. Researchers say the data to do it is already sitting there. [15]

Denver's school district placed two orders for bulk dry-erase markers on the same day in August 2023, and paid $114.52 for one and $149.07 for the other. Across 55,000 repeat purchases by 23 public bodies, the buyers could have saved about 17% at the platform's own lowest prices. [17]

Why it matters. A public budget is spent by people who cannot watch a price all day, which is exactly who a moving price costs most.

MPs defeated a motion on 15 April to prohibit pricing set from personal data. A poll by Abacus Data in March found 52% of Canadians would ban it once it was explained, and another 31% would regulate it more tightly. [10]

Why it matters. Public opinion and the law are moving at different speeds, and the practice is spreading in the gap.

Prices on items left in a cart at one large clothing retailer moved repeatedly over several days, and in some cases waiting produced a discount of up to 17%. [18]

Why it matters. The same tool that punishes urgency rewards patience, which is why it is not simply a price rise.

Guardian readers writing about renewals pointed to the regulator's ruling that insurers cannot charge existing home and car customers more than new ones, and said insurers carried on anyway. One reader was paying £424.40 a year for breakdown cover and bought cover elsewhere for £101.40. [19]

Why it matters. It is the same mechanism as the algorithm, running on nothing more than the assumption you will not check.

The insurer began paying a record $5bn dividend to eligible car insurance customers on 31 July. It follows a J.D. Power finding that 57% of US drivers re-shopped their cover in 2025, a record. [20]

Why it matters. Prices set on how likely you are to leave move when people start leaving.

Visa and Mastercard settled with merchants over the fees shops pay on every card payment. The average fee is about 2.33%, and US businesses paid well over $100bn in a year. [21]

Why it matters. The fee never appears on your receipt, because it is inside the shelf price everyone pays.

The settlement ends the requirement that a shop accepting one Visa credit card must accept all of them. Fees will likely be layered by card, and some businesses may refuse the most expensive ones. [22][23]

Why it matters. The average shopper carries about four cards, and they are about to stop being interchangeable. [23]

Interchange fees run at roughly 1.5% to 3.5% of each purchase, and they fund the rewards. When the US capped interchange on debit cards, debit rewards programmes essentially disappeared. [24][25]

Why it matters. Interchange can feed into what a shop charges, and some shops now add a card fee of about 2.5% instead of absorbing it. [25][23]

Uswitch put the average annual increase in combined UK household bills at £214.10 from 1 April. Council tax was more than half of it, with a typical band D bill in England up £111 to £2,392, and water up £33 to £639. [26][27]

Why it matters. Nothing about April makes things cost more; it is simply the date most of the annual rises are set for.

The price cap dropped 7% in April, cutting a typical annual bill by £117 to £1,641. Cornwall Insight then forecast £1,929 from July, a rise of 18%. [28][27]

Why it matters. The saving came from moving some charges off bills and onto general taxation, which is a different pocket rather than a smaller cost. [28]

About 1.7 million households in England and Wales heat with kerosene, which the energy price cap does not cover. Their bills doubled after the strikes on Iran, some orders were cancelled, and 62.5% of homes in Northern Ireland rely on it. [29]

Why it matters. A protection defined by the fuel you use leaves whoever uses a different fuel entirely exposed.

Electricity prices have risen 40% since February 2020, against 26% for the overall cost of living. Demand from new data centres, retired power plants and gas prices are all named as causes. [30]

Why it matters. It is the clearest case of a household bill rising because of something happening in an industry the household has no part in.

Data centres are putting pressure on the grid and on electricity costs. That has reached national, state and local leaders, and the people living near them. The Trump administration announced a Ratepayer Protection Pledge. [43]

Why it matters. The question is not whether the power gets built but which bill it lands on.

The average June-to-September electricity cost was forecast to rise 8.5% to $778. In the region covering Florida, Georgia and the Carolinas it was forecast at $860, up 13.5%. [45]

Why it matters. Summer cooling is not optional in those states, which is what makes the rise land unevenly.

Prices in the lower 48 states ranged from 8 cents a kilowatt-hour in North Dakota to 27 cents in California in 2024. A typical home uses about 900 kilowatt-hours a month. [44]

Why it matters. The same appliance costs three times as much to run depending only on where it is plugged in.

Nearly one in 20 US households risked having utility debt sent to collections going into winter, and severely overdue utility debt rose 3.8% in six months. Average US energy bills exceed $260 a month, and top $300 in some north-eastern states. [39]

Why it matters. A bill you cannot pay stops being a bill and becomes a credit record.

Average US electricity prices rose about 6.7% over the past year and natural gas about 10.8%, against a campaign promise to halve energy prices. [46]

Why it matters. Energy prices answer to weather, exports, infrastructure and demand, so a pledge to halve them was never a lever anyone held. [46]

The Financial Ombudsman found Monzo had wrongly rejected 34% of the 3,372 fraud and scam complaints referred to it last year, the worst rate among the most-complained-about UK banks. NatWest was second on 33% and HSBC third on 32%. [31]

Why it matters. Fraud is now an estimated 41% of all crime in England and Wales, so the appeal rate is not a small corner of banking. [31]

UK rules from October 2024 require a refund within five working days, up to £85,000, but the bank must be told within 13 months of the last payment. One woman was told she would get £1,000 of £20,000 stolen, and was refunded in full a day after journalists asked. [32]

Why it matters. National Trading Standards wants the clock to start when a victim realises, because investment fraud can run for years before anyone knows. [32]

A proposed scheme would automatically reimburse verified scam losses below A$3,000. Australia had 481,523 scam reports worth A$2.18bn last year, with a median loss of $400. [33]

Why it matters. Most complaints sit under the threshold, but most of the money lost sits above it. [33]

The Federal Reserve's vice chair for supervision, Michelle Bowman, told a Washington symposium in May that fraud is as old as money but now differs in scale, sophistication and impact. [42]

Why it matters. It puts a bank supervisor's name to the claim that the defences have not kept up.

Low-income households across the West Midlands pay an extra £241m a year for essentials. That is the second worst-affected region in Britain after London, on research for Fair By Design by the University of Bristol. [34]

Why it matters. One Birmingham mother described buying a cheaper fridge freezer she could afford and then paying for it in electricity. [34]

Around a quarter of people in Wales have cut down or skipped meals to make ends meet, the Bevan Foundation reported. Disabled people and families with children are under most pressure. [35]

Why it matters. It is the point where a household stops absorbing higher prices and starts absorbing less food.

A report on Stoke-on-Trent found 18,989 children, or 36%, in low-income households, up from 25.7% a decade earlier, with Universal Credit claims up 158% since before the pandemic. Its lead researcher called it a humanitarian crisis. [48]

Why it matters. Every extra cost in this edition lands hardest on exactly this population.

Nearly half of Detroit residents over 65 spend at least 30% of their income on housing costs, even as property values in the city fall. [36]

Why it matters. An asset that is worth less can still cost more to keep, and a fixed income cannot absorb either.

Northern Ireland's relative poverty rate for 2023 fell from 18% to 14% when officials switched from surveys to benefits records, and pensioner poverty from 12% to 7%. UK child poverty figures are expected to be revised down for the same reason. [41][47]

Why it matters. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation said this is a more accurate measurement of incomes, not a real fall. [41]

Bankrate's survey of more than 500 banks and credit unions put the US national average savings rate at 0.63% in August 2026, while the best high-yield accounts paid around 4%. [37]

Why it matters. The gap is not a market rate; it is what a bank pays customers who do not move.

Data brokers buy phone and browser data to sell to advertisers, and sell the same information, including bulk phone location data, to police forces and federal agencies without a warrant. [38]

Why it matters. The profile that sets your price has more than one buyer.

Aviation kerosene rose from $830 a tonne to more than $1,500 after strikes on Iran disrupted Gulf supply, which provides about half of Europe's imports. Wizz Air warned of a €50m hit to annual profit. [40]

Why it matters. It is the cleanest example of a price that moves for reasons nothing about the passenger explains.