They are, but I wasn't complaining about a specific mechanism, but rather our industry's current obsession with reducing price transparency and predictability - using whatever mechanism is relevant, whether surge pricing or plain old price discrimination.

I'm imagining a future where to get even the most basic everyday things done you'd have to store in your head the pricing models of dozens of companies, including understanding of their pricing algorithms (whether it's demand-based or preference-based or whatever-based). Simply navigating pricing structures will become a major time sink in everyone's life.

You know the pain it is to book airline tickets? The pricing instability where some plane tickets get cheaper as you approach the flight date but some get vastly more expensive, and tickets are cheaper on some weekdays but not others? Yeah, imagine that, extended to every facet of your life, even small everyday transactions.

What a nightmare.

Think about someone picking up, e.g., half of a store's supply of Snickers. This increases local demand for Snickers right now and the supply doesn't change. Surge pricing suggests that this is a good time to increase price. Then the same is true, though to a lesser degree, when someone picks up one bar.

(Though sorites paradox.)

Double the price of gas during a crisis? It's called price gauging. Put lipstick on a pig, it's still a pig

It's a good thing there are many protests against the rising price of chocolates right before Valentine's Day.

The gas price doublers might get the news and the local representatives being outraged, but, empirically, few care about smaller instances of price discrimination.