I am a frugal, picky shopper who lives in a neighborhood where your products aren’t purchased very often, and my web browsing history suggests I’m unlikely to purchase anything that doesn’t have a really obvious discount. At least that’s what I want the algorithms to think. It turns out that a lot of the prices you see on the Internet have been customized to specifically match your personal demographic. “It may come as a surprise that … you might be participating in a carefully designed social-science experiment. But this is what online comparison shopping hath wrought. Simply put: Our ability to know the price of anything, anytime, anywhere, has given us, the consumers, so much power that retailers — in a desperate effort to regain the upper hand, or at least avoid extinction — are now staring back through the screen. They are comparison shopping us.” In The Atlantic, Jerry Useem explains How Online Shopping Makes Suckers of Us All. (And, yes, even the suckers are variably priced…)