12 OctOber 1 - 7, 2026 dallasobserver.com DALLAS OBSERVER Classified | MusiC | Dish | Culture | unfair Park | Contents What’s the worst thing that’s ever hap- pened in your kitchen — that you can speak of? I’ve been fortunate not to experience too much major drama. The worst is always see- ing someone get seriously injured during ser- vice, whether it’s a bad cut or burn. What food or dish from your childhood do you miss the most? Definitely my grandmother’s cooking. Nothing can really replace it. What’s the toughest challenge facing the restaurant industry right now? The rising cost of everything. Sometimes ingredients become so expensive that, no mat- ter how much you love them, it just doesn’t make sense to put them on the menu. What’s an often overlooked part of running a restaurant that can ultimately sink it? Financial discipline. You can have a full dining room and still have an unhealthy busi- ness. Understanding your costs and managing them without compromising the guest experi- ence is essential. Which chef would you like me to send this questionnaire to next? Chef Eduardo Osorio from Meridian. (We actually already talked to him!) ▼ TECHNOLOGY FLOCK WHO? SURVEILLANCE PRICING MANIPULATES PRICES TO SQUEEZE MORE OUT OF CONSUMERS AND CONGRESS IS ALREADY WORKING ON LAWS TO BLOCK IT. BY JEFF SIEGEL E very Friday is pizza night at your house, so every Friday night, you order pizza using your favorite de- livery service. That’s straightforward enough, a process familiar to millions of us. But how would you feel if that third-party delivery service – knowing that you ordered pizza every Fri- day night, as well as possessing related personal information that it collected dur- ing your previous orders – charged you a higher price for pizza from the restaurants on its site than it charged other customers? Welcome to the joys of surveillance pric- ing, which probably doesn’t explicitly exist quite yet, say the experts, but is worrying enough that the federal government is studying the concept, also called personal- ized pricing — a friendly yet deceiving term. The goal is to write regulations to forbid this tactic. In August, the Federal Trade Com- mission asked for public comment on the practice, which it described as the use of personal data to set prices according to the amount that a company believes an individ- ual consumer is willing to spend. “The seller has extra information about you and it wants to be able to use that,” says SMU Cox marketing professor Venky Shan- kar, PhD, the chair of the Cox marketing de- partment. “The FTC wants to find a way so that the seller can’t use your personal infor- mation against you to make you pay more for the same items.” In one respect, this kind of personal pric- ing isn’t new. Supermarkets, for instance, have troves of personal information gleaned from loyalty programs that they mine to of- fer coupons and discounts. And airlines, us- ing what’s called dynamic pricing, literally change airfares minute by minute based on demand for that specific flight. Surveillance pricing differs because it isn’t based on supply and demand, like dy- namic pricing, or on marketing to retain cus- tomers, like loyalty programs. Rather, it uses personal information to charge more be- cause that information exists and makes it possible. So far, industry experts say surveillance pricing seems best suited to third-party ser- vices like travel and food and grocery deliv- ery. Your local pizza shop doesn’t have the technology or resources to do it, while most grocers – even the biggest – seem more fo- cused on traditional loyalty programs. Third-party trap But third-party services have so much personal information, as well as the technol- ogy to use it, that they may well know the price consumers are willing to pay – and to change the price depending on the individ- ual consumer, says David Quigley, PhD, a clinical professor of economics at the Uni- versity of Texas-Arlington. So what can a hungry consumer do to make sure they aren’t getting cheated? Short of setting up a second account from a differ- ent IP address to compare prices site by site, not much. That’s why the FTC is involved, says Quigley. If the delivery service says it uses personal information for surveillance pric- ing in its terms of service – the line after line of fine print on every web site that no one ever reads – then what they’re doing is prob- ably legal, he says (with the caveat that he’s not an attorney). “Unless the FTC can do something, or unless Congress changes the law, the con- sumer doesn’t have much recourse,” says Quigley, “short of not using services if they think the site is engaging in this practice.” Which doesn’t do much to help out on Friday pizza night. Lauren Drewes Daniels Do companies know how much we’re willing to pay for things? Lauren Drewes Daniels The Chef Prep Q&A from p11 Chef Christophe De Lellis at Mamani ICYMI IN CASE YOU MISSED IT SUBSCRIBE TO OUR DAILY NEWSLETTER DALLASOBSERVER.COM/SIGNUP