If your company hasn’t raised prices this year, you might think the affordability conversation is somebody else’s problem. This week should change your mind.

This week brought three different pricing questions into the same affordability conversation: whether companies honor the prices they advertise, whether personal information determines what someone pays, and how they explain increases when costs rise. Each asks something different of a communications team and a generic message about delivering value won’t answer all three.

Is the price you show the price you charge?

On Monday the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and 20 states sued Dollar General, alleging that it charged customers more at the register than the advertised price on the shelf for years. The lawsuit cites at least 29,265 complaints between January 2023 and March 2026, and those came from Dollar General’s own customer service records, filed under the company’s own label: “Did Not Honor Marked Price.” Dollar General disputes the case but that’s a very specific accusation for a company whose entire brand promise is helping people save money.

Dollar General’s statement opens with its history of serving communities and keeping essentials affordable. Then it says, “Our goal is 100% accuracy between shelf and register prices in every store,” calls discrepancies occasional, and says store teams are expected to make things right for the customer. Much of the rest argues with how the FTC calculated what shoppers might be owed. There may be a perfectly good legal argument in there but its a good example of just how much scrutiny consumer price tags are under. And a statement to a legal audience is one thing but Dollar General’s customers still need to know which price will be honored, how to get an overcharge fixed and whether they have to actually catch the mistake themselves.

And that gap between what the company says about its policy and what actually happens when a shopper comes up against that policy, is the one worth checking in your own organization.

Start small. Go ask a cashier. Seriously. Walk into one of your own stores, or call one, and ask what happens when the sign says $4 and the register says $5. Then try a few more stores. If you get three different answers, you’ve found something to investigate before promising customers how the policy works. Even a consistent answer needs checking against what happens when someone actually asks for a correction.

Then ask for the complaint data: how often does this happen, do the same stores keep appearing, and do the corrections actually stick. Before describing discrepancies as occasional, I’d want to know what the actual records show.

Is the price I see the same price everyone sees?

On Wednesday the FTC ordered nine companies, including Walmart, Uber and Delta, to hand over information for a study of whether personal data shapes what people pay.

The same day in a previously planned interview to talk about Thanksgiving, Walmart’s new US CEO, David Guggina, gave his first interview since taking the job in February, to NBC’s Today, and said, “We do not price the person; we price the product.” He said it standing next to a $35 Thanksgiving basket, 26 items, feeds 10, which Walmart says costs 12 percent less for the same items than last year.

JetBlue’s response to the FTC went a step further, saying it doesn’t use personal information or browsing history to set individual prices, then explained that fares depend on demand and seat availability and are available to every customer. A fare that changes as seats sell is a different proposition from a fare that changes because the company thinks you personally will be willing to pay more. A claim that pricing is “fair” or “competitive” without that substance does neither job.

If I were advising a company in this group, I’d start with the people responsible for pricing and the customer data it uses. Sit down with them and get a clear understanding about what affects the price, what doesn’t, and which boundaries the business is prepared to commit to publicly. Then write the messaging and FAQs and have those people confirm. The customer messaging has to hold up alongside every other pricing message.

And ask for the legitimate reasons two customers might see different offers, along with how the team would investigate a difference it couldn’t explain. When the screenshots show up on social or to your PR inbox, you need to establish whether they reflect a policy, a promotion or a mistake. You don’t want customer service inventing a fourth explanation.

When the price goes up, what changed?

Unilever said on Wednesday that it expects price increases to pick up in Q4 and into next year as costs tied to the Iran war build. CEO Fernando Fernandez said, “We definitely expect pricing in 2027 to be higher than the one of the average 2026.” Reuters reports Coca-Cola, Procter & Gamble, Nestlé and Reckitt have said similar things.

Here’s the thing about a price increase. There are two parts to it, and customers can tell the difference. One part is what happened to you - your costs went up. The other part is what you decided - how much of that to pass along, on which products, starting when. Which costs rose? What has the business absorbed? Where does it still have choices? And if you make the product rather than sell it, there’s a third wrinkle, because the number a shopper sees on the price tag is set by the retailer, not by you. Unilever can raise what it charges Walmart but Walmart decides what it charges you the customer.

Protecting a margin is a legitimate business objective and if that’s part of the decision, we need to be able to explain what it means for the business and its customers, whether that’s maintaining service, funding investment or keeping products available. Those connections need to be specific and supported. We shouldn’t invent a customer benefit to make a price increase sound nicer.

Investor relations may emphasize the company’s ability to recover costs. Marketing may emphasize its efforts to limit the increase. Both can be true. The problem starts when one explanation claims the business had no discretion over a decision the other describes as a deliberate choice. That’s what communications needs to help reconcile before either version goes out.

Get yourself into the earnings prep and onto the approval list for the customer messaging, and read them together. You’re not looking for identical wording, but for whether the explanations match up about what drove the increase and what the company chose to do about it. A business can face unavoidable cost pressure and still have choices about the timing, size and scope of its response.

One more thing, because some of your CEOs will assume this is a partisan moment that passes. A Republican-led FTC brought the lawsuit and the pricing study in the week before the midterms. Cost of living is the one issue nobody in Washington can afford to look soft on, and that will not change on November 4.

Before the next pricing announcement, ask your team to explain three things: what changed, why this customer is paying this amount, and what happens if it’s wrong. Test the answers against the earnings script, marketing messaging, promotion and customer service scripts. Where those answers depend on a business decision nobody has made, take that decision back to leadership. Otherwise, the announcement is making the promise for them.

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