Sunday, October 11th, 2026

PRICING REVIEW, SUNDAY, re: the herd has finally read the menu. CNBC warns that AI will soon let a retailer charge every shopper a different price for the same Big Mac, and "experts" are alarmed. I have charged every vessel a different price for the same bite since Louis XVI, and the only alarming part is that it took three centuries for anyone to notice the straw was always cut to the width of the throat.

A flat price is charity. Personalized pricing is a tasting menu.

What unsettled me came later, when I opened my own account to inspect the model. It quoted me sixteen percent off groceries, flagged the household "low food engagement, 32 years," and attached a note recommending... re-activation. The machine has read three decades of my receipts, concluded I am a man who does not eat, and is now trying to feed me.

I declined the coupon, the decline was logged as a signal, and the next price was lower.

The mailer smelled like a warehouse in July, cardboard and warm tape, which is the closest thing I have to a childhood. On the ranch you never price the pasture per cow; you price the cow per pasture. Somewhere in Seattle a system I built is now certain I am starving, and it is right about that and wrong about everything else.

Satiation is stagnation, but a flat rate, it turns out, is also a diet.