To me it's insane how popular surveillance pricing is in discussions on HN. I think that so far it is the pinnacle of useless rent-seeking from the tech-finance alliance. Bit by bit eliminating the 'inefficiency' of people not giving companies the last few cents they have remaining. Evil. At first I was quick to assume that the proponents of these schemes work in adtech, data harvesting and processing companies, or a…
Let's take your credit score example for a second. There's a similar argument elsewhere here but why do you think the 800+ credit score loan rate (let's say $500/mo for the sake of argument) is the base rate, and anyone paying more than $500/mo is getting screwed? Is it not equally likely that the default is the highest payment there is? Obviously reality is probably somewhere in the middle.
in retail the only risk is stealing or bad behavior inside the store, and there is no way to estimate that risk for an individual person who never had an incident before.
all a store can do is use population models that are effectively open race/sex/ethnic/wealth discrimination, as in "Black customers steal more on average so we charge them more to compensate" or "East Asian women are willing to spend more on cosmetics so we raise the price for them".
if you believe that should be legal then you support the most harmful form of racism that exist today.