Those situations aren’t the same: Walmart charges everyone the same price and they advertise those prices so they’re stable over some time. Uber has multiple sources of dynamic behavior and so I think it’s reasonable to demand visibility, similar to how an airplane fare breaks down the portions which are demand based from the things which are static.

> Walmart charges everyone the same price

This... isn't true. The same item at a Walmart near San Francisco will have a different price than in nowhere, Kansas.

But the person I was responding to was saying that the reasons for a price need to be transparent, which I think is orthogonal to whether a company has universal same-price-for-everyone guarantees.

And most companies do not charge the same thing to everyone, even within a market. Think about AAA and senior discounts, loyalty programs, etc.

It’s true in a market for Walmart but not Uber, and the same is true for everything else you mentioned – senior discounts don’t vary per-person. I think that’s a fundamental difference since private per-customer pricing opens up the possibility for the kind of abuses which Uber has been accused of repeatedly.

> You don’t get to tell Walmart they have to give a breakdown of everything that went into a pricing decision.

If Walmart would have a custom price for everyone that walks in based on how much Walmart thinks they can afford, then yes: absolutely there should be more transparency.