Is Your Price Just Yours? The FTC’s New Inquiry, Wendy’s Menu Boards and the Pandemic Pricing Fight

The FTC ordered nine companies, from Uber and DoorDash to Target and Walmart, to say whether personal data shapes what you pay and what drivers earn. It comes after an Ohio burger chain's 2024 backlash and four years of argument over how hard companies pushed prices after COVID.

By Rich Vandall · Oct. 29, 2026

The Federal Trade Commission has ordered nine companies to explain whether the prices they charge, and in some cases the pay they offer workers, change from one person to the next based on personal data, the agency announced Oct. 28.

The orders went to three airlines, Delta, United and JetBlue; the ride-hailing companies Uber and Lyft; the delivery companies DoorDash and Instacart; and the retailers Target and Walmart. The commission voted 2-0 to issue them, and each company has 45 days from receiving its order to respond.

What the FTC wants to know

On prices, the agency asks whether the cost of a plane ticket, a ride, a delivery or another product varies from person to person, pointing to factors such as loyalty-program membership and the analysis of personal data by what it called "superintelligence algorithms."

On pay, the FTC said ride-hailing and delivery companies may pay workers shifting amounts under opaque formulas, possibly based on data such as how drivers use their phones or whether they accepted past offers. The orders ask all nine companies to document the inputs, tools and procedures they use to set or adjust prices and pay.

Chairman Andrew N. Ferguson said the agency intends to scrutinize "the opaque methodology that some companies in these industries may be using." He also said, "Workers also deserve to know if their compensation is affected by how companies use their personal data."

The orders were issued under Section 6(b) of the FTC Act, which lets the commission run wide-ranging studies without a specific law enforcement purpose. A 6(b) study is not a lawsuit, and the release does not accuse any of the nine companies of breaking the law.

The second try

This is the FTC's second look at personalized pricing in two years. In July 2024, under then-Chair Lina Khan, the agency ordered companies that sell pricing tools to explain them. In January 2025, days before President Donald J. Trump took office, staff reported that those tools can draw on location, demographics, browsing patterns and shopping history, and that signals as small as cursor movements on a web page and items left in an online cart can be tracked and used to tailor prices. Khan said, "Americans deserve to know how their private data is being used to set the prices they pay." The commission voted 3-2 to release that report; Ferguson, then a commissioner, dissented.

Ferguson's FTC now says the earlier study looked only at middlemen that sell pricing services, not at the businesses that set consumer prices, and describes the new orders as correcting that. In August 2026, the commission also asked for public comment on a proposed policy statement describing how using a person's information, without telling them, to set a unique price could violate the FTC Act.

The Wendy's menu boards

The fight over prices that move had a preview in Ohio. On a Feb. 15, 2024, call with analysts, Wendy's, which is headquartered in Dublin, Ohio, said it planned to invest about $20 million to put digital menu boards in all of its company-operated U.S. restaurants by the end of 2025, Nation's Restaurant News reported. CEO Kirk Tanner said that "beginning as early as 2025" the chain would test features such as "dynamic pricing and daypart offerings, along with AI-enabled menu changes and suggestive selling," according to NBC News coverage that included reporting from The Associated Press.

Headlines called it surge pricing, and the backlash was fast. Burger King answered with a "No urge to surge" promotion. Less than two weeks after the call, Wendy's said it had no plans to raise prices at peak times. "We have no plans to do that and would not raise prices when our customers are visiting us most," the company said, adding that any features it might test "would be designed to benefit our customers and restaurant crew members." A spokesperson, Heidi Schauer, said the company had not used the phrase surge pricing, "nor do we plan to implement that practice," RetailWire reported.

The Despoiler found no public report that Wendy's ever ran a peak-price test. The menu boards were a plan to make prices easy to change; the outcry is what stopped the idea of raising them at the busiest hours.

Is there a COVID connection?

The timing lines up: the push to price more precisely came on the heels of the pandemic price surge. Whether companies used the moment to widen their margins is one of the most argued questions in economics since 2021, and the research splits.

Evidence that profits played a big role. Kansas City Fed economists Andrew Glover, José Mustre-del-Río and Alice von Ende-Becker found that markups rose about 3.4% in 2021, a year when inflation measured by the PCE price index was 5.8%, so markup growth could account for more than half of that year's inflation. They added that the timing fit companies raising prices ahead of costs they expected, more than a jump in monopoly power. The Economic Policy Institute, a labor-aligned think tank, calculated that fatter profit margins explained 53.9% of price growth in the nonfinancial corporate sector from the second quarter of 2020 through the end of 2021, compared with an average of 11.4% from 1979 to 2019.

The FTC itself reported in March 2024 that grocery retailers' revenues rose to more than 6% above their total costs in 2021, above the previous peak of 5.6% in 2015, and reached 7% in the first three quarters of 2023. The agency said the largest retailers, Kroger, Walmart and Amazon among them, "accelerated and distorted the negative effects associated with supply chain disruption," as the Ohio Capital Journal reported.

Evidence that profits weren't the main driver. San Francisco Fed economists Sylvain Leduc, Huiyu Li and Zheng Liu found in May 2024 that markups jumped in a few industries, such as motor vehicles, but that the economy-wide markup "stayed essentially flat since the start of the recovery." Their conclusion: markups "were not a main driver of the post-pandemic surge in inflation."

So the honest answer is a correlation, not a proven cause. Companies did raise prices faster than their costs in some industries during the recovery, and the tools to set prices person by person spread in the same years. The FTC says its new orders, unlike the 2024 study, go to the businesses that set the prices themselves.

What to watch

The nine companies' answers are due 45 days after they receive the orders. The FTC usually shares what it learns from a 6(b) study in a later staff report. The release did not include responses from the companies.

Miami Valley shoppers buy from Target and Walmart, local drivers work for Uber, Lyft, DoorDash and Instacart, and Wendy's is an Ohio company. If you have seen different prices than a friend for the same ride, flight or delivery, or your pay offers changed in ways you couldn't explain, tell us.