A Worthy Cause
Back in the Arena: Part 3 — A Worthy Cause
Six months ago, I announced I was returning to the founder's seat. Three months ago, I revealed Stretch to the world.
Yesterday, Consumer Reports confirmed just what we are up against.
Their investigation revealed that the grocery industry has been running secret pricing experiments on American families. Every single shopper they tested was unknowingly part of an algorithmic experiment. Three-quarters of products showed different prices for different customers. The same basket of groceries varied by nearly 10% from one customer to the next. Consumer Reports estimates that to be a potential $1,200 annual swing for a family of four.
One former FTC Chair put it plainly: "We are moving from a transparent market with public prices to an opaque world where we are alone against secret algorithms."
Alone against secret algorithms.
That single sentence captures why Stretch exists.
Theodore Roosevelt's famous "Man in the Arena" speech is usually remembered for its opening: "It is not the critic who counts…" But the heart of the passage comes later, when he describes what separates those in the arena from those watching safely from the stands.
It's not talent. It's not success. It's not even courage.
It's finding something worth spending yourself on.
"The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena... who spends himself in a worthy cause."
Spends himself. Not invests. Not allocates. Spends, as in uses up, exhausts, pours out completely.
I've thought about that word a lot over the past decade.
Building Basket to 650,000 families and watching it fail. I was spent.
Stepping back to coach other founders while the problem I had worked so hard on remained unsolved.
When I finally started to get over the PTSD of Basket, and saw grocery prices had become the number one source of financial stress for American families, and that the industry had built ever more sophisticated systems to extract value from them, the question was never whether the cause was worthy.
The question was whether I was willing to spend myself on it again.
Yesterday's Consumer Reports investigation answered a different question: what exactly are we up against?
The findings are stark. Retailers are using AI to determine exactly how much more each family will pay before deciding not to buy. They call it "smart rounding" and "price sensitivity optimization." The “shopper ceiling.” Their internal documents boast about "millions of dollars in annual incremental sales." Their corporate materials explicitly note that "shoppers are not aware that they're in an experiment."
In Stretch’s own research, nearly half of American households say groceries cost more than they can afford. More than half of families earning six figures are trading down to cheaper food. One in five shoppers is financing groceries with credit cards or Buy Now, Pay Later.
In the full video breakdown of the report, they compare this to Uber's surge pricing and its success in turning them profitable. I hate this comparison, as if groceries are just another service to optimize.
But Uber is a luxury. You can wait out the surge. You can take the train. You can skip the trip.
Groceries are how you feed your family. There is no "wait ten minutes" when your kids need dinner tonight.
Dynamic pricing on a rideshare is annoying. Dynamic pricing on food is predatory.
This is what Trae Stevens calls a Hard/Good problem, the kind that repeat founders and smart money should focus on but rarely do.
Hard because you're fighting a $1.8 trillion industry that has spent billions building algorithmic systems specifically designed to maintain information asymmetry. Hard because the complexity is intentional. Hard because the incumbents have patents, AI infrastructure, and every incentive to keep shoppers in the dark.
Good because 100 million American families are being experimented on without their knowledge or consent. Good because the harm is concrete and measurable. Good because the moral case is unambiguous.
Easy/Good problems get crowded fast. Hard/Good problems require conviction, domain expertise, and the willingness to spend yourself on something that might not work. More than once.
I had all the reasons this year to look at this space and stay away.
But I am so glad I didn’t.
And I am so proud of the team and the investors who have already joined this fight. It is truly humbling to be arm in arm with such incredible people serving the shoppers.
Stretch was built for this moment.
When you build your shopping list in Stretch, you see what your groceries will cost across every retailer in your area before you leave home. Not what one algorithm decided to show you, but the published price for everyone on every product on your list. The actual prices, compared across all stores on the platform, all in one place.
This is what it means to not be alone against secret algorithms.
The grocery industry has spent billions building systems to understand shoppers better than shoppers understand themselves. Stretch is starting to give that intelligence back to the families who need it most.
Every shopping list created is a small act of transparency in a system designed for opacity. Every price comparison is a vote from a family that refuses to remain unaware anymore.
We're not building a better coupon app. Stretch developing methods and algorithms to disable and detect these types of practices. We're building the infrastructure that makes algorithmic exploitation unsustainable as shoppers realize they now have their own digital advocate.
To the builders who want to spend themselves on something that matters: we're hiring in New York City.
To the investors who back worthy causes, not just safe bets: we're raising capital to scale what we've built.
To the families who are tired of being alone against secret algorithms: join us at stretchformore.com.
The arena demands everything. That's what makes it the arena.
But some causes are worth being spent on.
This is one of them.
-Andy
Stretch is building the consumer intelligence platform that shifts power back to shoppers. Learn more at stretchformore.com