Businesses have gotten very good at leveraging technology to move prices around and extract more money from us. The newest frontier: Companies using black box software and personalized data to set special just-for-you prices, and hoping — pretty reasonably — that no one realizes what's going on. Which is how Business Insider's Peter Kafka and Emily Stewart convinced their bosses to let them order McDonald's and expense it. It wasn't just to get a free lunch — they wanted to see if they could find out how this variable, personalized pricing thing might work. After making their selections, the subtotals told the tale: None of them were asked to pay the same amount. Their total bills varied by 15 to 20 cents. Read more about their Big Mac pricing experiment — and how the costs were all over the place — at the link in our bio. Story by Peter Kafka and Emily Stewart (Credit: Jutharat Pinyodoonyachet for Business Insider) #mcdonalds #pricing #fastfood