Why does everything feel like a scam?

I live in New York, which is a very expensive city, so I have become somewhat desensitized to paying stupid amounts of money for normal things. I don’t regularly experience sticker shock because, to some extent, I live inside the sticker shock.

But lately, even I have been losing the plot.

A few months ago, I paid $35 for tortellini at a restaurant and received four pieces of tortellini. I recently saw supermarket strawberries listed for $15. The other day I was shopping for a trash can and discovered that a distressing percentage of them cost more than $100.

And even outside the confines of New York, my sense of what constitutes a normal price seems to melt away: replacement charging cables, drugstore skincare, streaming subscriptions, concert tickets, luggage, any piece of furniture. I encounter perfectly ordinary things and think, Wait, is that actually what this costs now?

At this point, the problem goes beyond things simply becoming more expensive. I increasingly have no idea how much any of this is supposed to cost.

Inflation alone doesn’t really explain the experience of being a consumer right now, which increasingly involves paying more for something that is smaller, worse, harder to buy, harder to return, attached to three separate fees, priced differently depending on where you look and possibly being recommended to you by a person who does not actually exist.

We have officially lost the price

Us humans are not particularly good at evaluating prices in isolation.

When you see a $22 sandwich, your brain is not conducting an independent analysis of bread costs, commercial rent, restaurant wages, profit margins and the current wholesale price of turkey before arriving at the fair market value of lunch. You are comparing it with something: maybe what a sandwich cost last year, what the place down the street charges, what you usually spend on lunch, and so on.

Behavioral researchers call these reference prices, the internal and external benchmarks we use to decide whether something feels cheap, expensive or fair. Those reference points influence how we judge prices and ultimately what we are willing to pay.

Which makes sense. Most of us don’t want every trip to CVS to become a market research project.

The entire point of having a functional consumer market is that you can develop shortcuts. You know, roughly, what toothpaste costs. You know that one grocery store tends to be cheaper than another. You know that if a sweater says “was $120, now $70,” $120 is supposedly the normal price and $70 is the deal.

Those shortcuts save an enormous amount of time and mental energy. And increasingly, they no longer work.

I’ve written before about surveillance pricing, where companies can use information about you and your behavior to estimate what you personally might be willing to pay; tierification, where the same basic product gets split into an increasing number of price and access levels; and dynamic pricing, where the number itself moves around according to demand, timing or whatever other inputs the algorithm is using.

Then you add shrinkflation, where the price stays familiar while the amount of product quietly declines; skimpflation, where quality or service deteriorates instead; “sales” built around dubious reference prices; and the ever-expanding universe of fees that reveal the actual cost only after you’ve emotionally committed to buying the thing.

The tactics are different, but the consumer experience is quite consistent: the number you initially see becomes less and less useful as a piece of information.

This pricing complexity does not merely annoy us (Which, oh boy it does. I’ll get to that in a second). It actually changes what we pay. In an experiment from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, buyers had a harder time comparing sellers and ultimately paid more when one total price was broken into smaller components.

In other words, confusion can be profitable.

The sale is fake. The price is fake. The thing might also be worse.

Once price stops functioning as a trustworthy signal, the uncertainty starts spreading to everything around it.

A sale doesn’t necessarily tell you that you’re saving money. A higher price doesn’t reliably tell you that something is higher quality. A familiar brand doesn’t guarantee that the product is being made the same way it was five years ago. A five-star review might have been purchased, generated or manipulated. And a “marketplace” that appears to offer 30 different options may actually just be the same two brands offering the same product under different names.

Let’s go back to my trashy example and say you wanted to wait for a sale to buy a trash can, taking a page out of the Responsible Consumer handbook. You wait until Prime Day, where you see that the can you want has been marked down 17% (!). A deal, right? Maybe not.

A Washington Post report tracked nearly 50 products during Amazon’s 2025 Prime Big Deal Days and found that many brands artificially inflated their prices the weeks leading up to Prime Day so the “deal” looked much more dramatic than their actual price history did.

So naturally, the solution is to open a third-party price tracker to determine whether the sale is a real sale, which is obviously exactly how I wanted to spend my limited time on earth.

And then, after doing all of that work, the thing may simply suck.

Companies can improve margins by raising the price, but consumers are price sensitive and rising prices are easy to notice. So instead, many companies improve margins by taking value out of the thing you were already buying. Maybe they replace the material with a cheaper one, or reduce the portion, or make customer service harder to access, or turn a previously standard feature into something available only on the premium tier.

The Guardian profiled consumers who have begun building literal databases tracking formerly trusted brands whose quality deteriorated after acquisitions or increasing financial pressure. Three-quarters of Americans reported experiencing a product-quality or service problem in 2025, roughly double the rate measured when the National Consumer Rage Study (obsessed with the title) began decades ago.

Inflation can explain why something costs more, but it does a much worse job explaining the extremely specific consumer experience of paying more for something you are fairly certain used to be better.

This is where the reference-point issue starts spreading beyond price. If the product itself keeps changing, your past experience stops being a reliable benchmark too.

No one wants to feel screwed over, so there’s something especially rage-inducing about feeling screwed over, again and again, by every product or service you interact with. And on top of all of this, the systems we rely on to figure out whether something is worth buying have become less trustworthy, too.

Influencer marketing already required the consumer to figure out whether a recommendation was real or sponsored, and now generative AI adds the possibility that the person enthusiastically demonstrating the product may not even exist. Some brands are already experimenting with synthetic characters and AI-generated product videos because they can produce huge amounts of advertising content cheaply and quickly.

The price is unstable, the quality is unstable, and now the information you’re using to evaluate both can be unstable too.

So … is any of this even real?

Free market, hello???

In theory, capitalism has a very obvious response to all of this. If a company charges too much, makes its product worse or treats you badly, you take your money somewhere else.

Competition is supposed to discipline this kind of behavior. The shitty company loses customers, a better competitor wins them, everybody learns a valuable lesson about capitalism, Adam Smith smiles down upon us, the end.

But this entire mechanism depends on there being somewhere else to go.

Over the past several decades, huge parts of the American economy have consolidated through mergers and acquisitions, including the private-equity strategy of buying up lots of smaller businesses in the same industry and combining them into a larger company. The FTC and Justice Department have specifically raised concerns about these kinds of “roll-ups,” noting that a company can accumulate significant control over a market through a series of smaller acquisitions, some of which are too small to trigger traditional federal merger review.

I wrote about this more extensively inEverything Is Private Equity <3, but the consumer consequence is that there are often fewer genuinely independent alternatives than it looks like there are.

You might see 20 brands on a shelf, or five companies pop up when you Google a service, but that does not necessarily mean you are choosing among 20 or even five businesses with meaningfully different incentives. Sometimes several of them have the same parent company. Sometimes a fragmented local industry has been rolled up into a handful of much larger operators. Sometimes the competition is technically still there, but every company has discovered the same profitable playbook.

So even when you can switch, switch to what?

If one airline discovers passengers will tolerate a new fee, the incentive for its competitors is to charge the fee, too. The same logic shows up in subscription tiers, worse customer service, smaller packages, premium upgrades and all the other little ways companies have learned to pull more money out of the same transaction.

Corporate greed is not a new phenomenon; companies have always been pretty into making money. What’s changed is the amount of leeway some companies have to make the product a little worse, the service a little more annoying or the price a little higher without losing enough customers for it to matter.

Inflation created unusually good cover for repricing because consumers already expected prices to go up. Once everyone’s internal reference point moves higher, there is no natural mechanism that automatically moves it back down when a company’s own costs improve, particularly if demand remains strong and competitors are charging something similar.

Which gets closer to what I think people actually mean when they say they feel “price gouged.” It’s not just that something costs more than it did five years ago, it’s that every transaction has become a test of the maximum amount of bullshit and money you’re willing to absorb before giving up.

Being a consumer now requires vigilance

Nearly 80% of Americans reported experiencing a product or service problem in 2025 and about two-thirds of those consumers said the experience made them feel “rage,” according to the National Consumer Rage Survey. Customer complaints have since continued hitting record levels.

Not only is there higher prices and worse service, being a competent consumer now requires a remarkable amount of unpaid administrative labor. From comparing prices to checking warranties and cancellations to researching quality reports to reading reviews to contacting customer service and begging for a human.

The Groundwork Collaborative estimates that Americans lose at least $165 billion every year in money and time to what it calls the “annoyance economy,” including hidden fees, spam, healthcare administration and the hours people spend trying to to fix things that should have worked correctly in the first place.

I’ve written before about what living in a low-trust environment does to us: the hypervigilance, the constant verification, the belief that if you don’t pay attention you will get screwed. But there’s another piece to this, too: It makes delayed gratification substantially less gratifying.

A lot of conventional financial advice is built around a very simple psychological bargain. You do not buy everything you want today. You save for the vacation, the furniture, the nice dinner, the concert, the nicer coat, whatever the thing is, and eventually you get the reward (the thing!) for having waited.

That bargain works much better when you have some confidence that the reward will actually feel rewarding.

It becomes considerably harder to get excited about diligently saving for the vacation when the hotel reveals another $300 in fees, or buying the expensive appliance when reviewers say the old version lasted 15 years and the new one lasts three, or finally splurging on the restaurant only to discover that your $35 buys four little pieces of tortellini.

You can do everything personal finance tells you to do (research, wait, save, spend intentionally) and still walk away feeling like an idiot.

And I think that matters. Saving is already psychologically difficult because the reward lives in the future. If the future reward itself starts feeling overpriced, degraded or scammy, the entire emotional case for waiting gets weaker.

You cannot comparison-shop your way out of a structural problem

So what are you actually supposed to do with any of this? Because not all of us feel like spending time Googling “best trash can 2026”.

There are a few places where I think individual behavior can help:

• Build your own reference points. For expensive or recurring purchases, look at the all-in price rather than the teaser price (how much does this subscription annually? What’s the cost per use of this item), check the actual price history when it is easy to do so, and know roughly what you consider reasonable before shopping so the psychological tricks retailers use have less power.
• Put a limit on how much attention you are willing to spend saving money. Adding a little friction before a large impulse purchase is useful; spending 45 minutes tracking down a coupon to save $6 is just another way the annoyance economy steals something from you.
• Actually leave when you have a meaningful alternative. If a product materially deteriorates, stop rewarding the brand. Buy secondhand if possible, but keep in mind that secondhand doesn’t always mean “high quality.” Brand loyalty is only useful when the brand gives you something worth being loyal to.

But there are extremely obvious limits to all of this.

You cannot meaningfully comparison-shop your internet when only one provider serves your building. You cannot personally create an airline competitor because every existing airline is charging you extra for an overhead bin.

Consumer protection, antitrust enforcement and transparent-pricing rules are also personal-finance issues because they determine how much individual effort the rest of us have to expend just to participate in a market. The Guardian’s reporting on consolidation makes the same point: switching only gives consumers power when there is actually somewhere useful to switch to.

Individual consumers can push back around the edges, but we cannot personally restore competition to an industry.

And I think knowing that matters because otherwise we turn yet another structural failure into a problem for the individual: just download these four apps, learn these five tricks, spend another hour comparison shopping, become better at spotting the scam.

I would argue an efficient market means you’re not supposed to need a finance degree, a spreadsheet, three browser extensions, Reddit and the investigative instincts of Bob Woodward to buy yogurt.

I will probably continue paying absurd amounts of money for things because I live in New York. And that’s fine. I don’t need everything to be cheap. In fact, I would be willing to pay more, in some cases, for a higher quality product or service. But if I’m spending $35 on tortellini, I would like the $35 to mean something.