By Lindsay Owens

For decades, the most ruthless form of American capitalism centered on cost-cutting. […] The results can be seen in ruined industrial ghost towns across the Midwest, and businesses strip-mined by leveraged buyouts. But there is a tipping point to all this cost-cutting. There’s only so much fat to cut before you hit bone. The strategy eventually had diminishing returns, and without a new strategy, profits would hit a plateau. That wouldn’t cut it on Wall Street.

Enter the age of recoupment. Instead of cutting costs, the new mantra is raising prices.

Price hikes are old as dirt. But today’s companies have reinvented them. They’re using a dizzying array of sophisticated and deceitful tricks to do something pretty darn simple: rip you off.

The new tricks have fancy new names. Charging you more for less is a corporate practice known as “shrinkflation.” Revealing part of the total price up front, only to tack on all manner of ridiculous-sounding fees and service charges: Industry insiders call that one “drip pricing.” Stealing your online shopping data to predict the maximum price you would be willing to pay for your next e-commerce purchase: That’s personalized pricing. Using software to coordinate pricing with other companies to make sure they don’t undercut each other: That’s algorithmic price-fixing (or plain old-fashioned collusion). And charging you more for an item when supply is limited: That’s Jay Powell’s favorite, dynamic pricing.

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With prices rising everywhere they turned, nobody could discern which were justified by companies’ own rising costs, and which were truly excessive. Highly engineered “dark patterns,” where people are tricked into signing up or paying more, were chalked up to the way things are now, rather than something more insidious. If a price surges, if a fee is tacked onto the bill, the culprit is the economy, not the company shoving their hands into your wallet.

CEOs hardly contain their delight on calls with investors. From the CFO of the international conglomerate 3M patting their team on the back for doing a “marvelous job in driving price,” to the CFO of the largest beer importer in the United States, Constellation Brands, who promised investors the company would “make sure we’re not leaving any pricing on the table” and “take as much as we can,” to the tech CEO who copped to “praying for inflation” and doing his “inflation dance,” these corporate executives were clear on one thing: Inflation was very good for business.