Price Monitoring, or Where Surveillance Studies Meets the Sociology of Price Formation

This essay stages an encounter between surveillance studies and the sociology of price and price formation. I argue that surveillance is integral to the calculative operations of retail price strategies, especially during periods of high inflation, and that these calculative operations hinge on the human infrastructure of a precarious data-collecting workforce. I present my argument through a case study of competitor price monitoring, a corporate surveillance practice in which commercial actors record, process, and transmit information on competitors’ pricing, inventory, and display strategies. While pricing intelligence services like web-scraping and dynamic pricing algorithms are typically applied in e-commerce settings, I focus here on a firm that specializes in the collection of brick-and-mortar retail price data, with special attention to the labor practices involved in the manual (in-person, device-aided) production of retail price information at the national-industrial scale. Building on auto-ethnographic observations as a price data collector as well as analysis of employee reviews of the firm on sites like Indeed and Glassdoor, I argue that surveillance studies can contribute in significant ways to our understanding of the material practices, and politics, of price and price formation.