Americans are paying more for everything, and Lindsay Owens thinks they know exactly who to blame. The economic sociologist and head of the Groundwork Collaborative, a progressive Washington thinktank, has written Gouged: The End of a Fair Price – and What That Means for Your Wallet, a book that argues the current wave of inflation and rising costs is not a natural market shift. It is a deliberate, coordinated effort by retailers, manufacturers and tech companies to keep prices high.
The book’s central claim is simple: the cost of living crisis is not accidental. It is engineered. Owens says the moment is right for a new consumer movement, and she calls for a consumer uprising and tough new rules to fix it.
Cost of Living Crisis and the Consumer Movement
Owens told the Guardian that a cost of living crisis is the right time to build the constituency for a revived consumer movement in this country. The book traces the rise in inflation and cost of living back to around 2021, a period that saw prices move sharply upward across basic goods and services. Her argument is that this was not a supply shock or a temporary blip. It was a strategic decision by companies to stop competing on price and start competing on opacity.
The evidence she points to includes data mining companies like EverSight, Kronos and Plexure, which collect vast amounts of personal data on consumers. One data broker claims to hold data profiles on roughly 95% of adults. Owens argues that this data collection enables coordinated pricing, where retailers can see what everyone else is charging and adjust their own prices accordingly. The result, she says, is that comparison shopping is almost impossible and refunds take three days to get through chatbots.
The book also cites the 120-year-old lightbulb in California, noting how manufacturers deliberately stopped producing bulbs that lasted that long through planned obsolescence. Owens says Americans are exhausted from high prices and increasingly opaque pricing, and she points to credit card use for basics and buy-now-pay-later tools as proof of how difficult shopping has become.
Shoppers’ Bill of Rights
The book closes with a “shoppers’ bill of rights,” a set of demands aimed at restoring some measure of fairness to the market. The key asks include:
- Bans on shared software used for price coordination.
- AI shopping assistants that act in consumers’ best interest, not just as marketing tools.
- Stronger privacy laws against data brokers.
These proposals are designed to reduce corporate power and protect individual consumers. Owens is explicit that this is not a complaint session. She wants action.
Consumer Rage
Owens frames her argument around consumer rage. She wants people to repeat after her: “it’s not my fault, it’s not my fault, it’s not my fault.” The idea is that shoppers have been conditioned to accept high prices as normal, but the frustration is real and growing. The book argues that this rage is rising, and nothing short of a consumer uprising and tough new rules will fix the problem.
The Guardian’s coverage captures the core arguments and the stakes without endorsing every detail. For readers who want to dig deeper, the book itself remains the primary source.
Paper’s View
When a story lines up with Clay Tribune’s principles — supporting small business, avoiding concentrations of power, protecting individual freedom — it should be argued for plainly and without hesitation. Owens’s book does exactly that.
It is a call to action dressed as a manifesto. Owens is telling shoppers that the fight is theirs to win, and she is giving them the weapons to do it. Whether the movement she envisions materialises is not yet known. What is clear is that Owens has put the case on the table, and she is not backing down.
Where the paper stands
The paper backs narrow disclosure rules requiring companies to reveal hidden safety failures and opposes broad licensing schemes that would hand the market to the biggest firms. Owens’s book is a call for action, not a complaint session, and its demands align with that principle: bans on shared software used for price coordination, AI shopping assistants acting in consumers’ best interest, and stronger privacy laws against data brokers.
The book’s demand for transparency about pricing software echoes the paper’s own position on disclosure. Owens is asking companies to reveal what they are doing, which is the kind of narrow rule the paper supports rather than a license that would favor incumbents.
Readers should watch for the book’s framing of the problem as a deliberate, coordinated effort by companies to keep prices high. The paper agrees that consumers deserve a fair price and that data collection can enable unfair pricing, but it would caution against rules that lock out small businesses and startups. Owens’s call for a consumer uprising is a reminder that the fight is far from over.
Source material: “Gouged: why Americans are being ripped off – and what to do about it,” The Guardian.
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