It's great to have you here on the Clark Howard Show. You know our mission is to serve you with advice and information that empowers you to make better financial decisions in your life. You know, I've talked in the past about how Amazon can price items differently based on your shopping patterns, but it turns out they are not

alone at all anymore. I'm going to tell you what you need to know about the loyalty tax. And later, there's

a trend in weddings. Wow, that is your futures's friend, people are consciously having more affordable

weddings. Yep, it can be done. So if you suspect that you're really being targeted

by a retailer or an airline or whatever

for potentially higher prices.

Apparently there's more and more data to support that is going on.

Now remember years ago there were all the rumors and also news reports that you were being price discriminated against if you were doing business with a company on a Macbook. The idea was that Macbook

customers were not as price sensitive as Windows computer users.

So retailers, at least the allegations were

that retailers were charging more to people coming from a Macbook.

It was never clear if that was an urban legend

or if that was actually going on.

So now we've moved to a new era with AI.

There's now a federal investigation because there have been whistleblowers saying

that certain banks, credit card companies, and certain data houses are providing companies with drilled down to you personal data and they

use that data to charge individual discriminatory prices.

And so the whole idea of this database stuff that supposedly is happening.

Again, this is early innings and it's only a federal investigation

based on whistleblowers.

But if the allegations are true, what's happening is companies are developing or buying the data on your to get customer or what I call a convenience shopper that you just go to that website

and you're going to buy from them that you're going to pay more. There have been

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