> It doesn't benefit the consumer or the working class

It should absolutely benefit the blue-collar consumer. Whom it hurts is the moderately rich. (If it works as intended.)

I don't think this makes any sense. If this were true, payday loans would be the lowest interest loans, and ghetto grocery stores would have the lowest prices.

The more money you have, the less desperate you are, the longer you can wait to make a purchase, and the more storage space and capital you have to enable you to get the ideal price/unit bulk rate. I don't think surveillance pricing will affect the moderately rich at all. It will only target the poor.

They will know that you have no bread left in the pantry, no car, two children and no other grocery store near you, and you will pay convenience store prices.

edit: Hell, they'll know that you have $10 left, so you can afford it. They'll know you have a history of taking payday loans when desperate, so they'll raise the price even when you can't afford it, and sell your identity to a payday loan company. The payday loan company will pay a bigger premium for you because they know you have a propensity to default.

Like a rideshare app offering worse pay to drivers who they know are heavily in debt and near their payment deadline? Offering less pay to people who are desperate and have no other options?

> Like a rideshare app offering worse pay to drivers who they know are heavily in debt and near their payment deadline?

No. Labour is a famously idiosyncratic market.

I'm not seeing this example as unrelated.

E.g. If a seller knows I've been searching for flu remedies, I've made a social media post related to the illness. Then I go to the pharmacy and everything related to alleviating those symptoms is more expensive for me.

Put simply, if they know you absolutely need something, they will leverage that information.

A larger more powerful organization has leverage over someone by collecting their data, and uses that to extract value from them.

I can’t quite understand your point. My example was a real reported behavior.

its still surveillance pricing - the payment from the working class here is their labour.

its the same exploitation in both cases

Well they also said they don't feel they're owed that privilege so it's probably not that simple.