From Taylor Swift tickets to gasoline — these days everyone feels like they’re being price-gouged. Are they?

Emily Miller lucked out. Of the millions of fans — and bots — flooding Ticketmaster’s site in hopes of purchasing tickets to Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, the 22-year-old managed to score $200 floor seats to see the mega pop star perform in Pittsburgh last summer.

Emily Miller lucked out. Of the millions of fans — and bots — flooding Ticketmaster’s site in hopes of purchasing tickets to Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, the 22-year-old managed to score $200 floor seats to see the mega pop star perform in Pittsburgh last summer. Now, Miller dreams of seeing Swift perform again when her tour returns to the US later this year. But despite entering 10 accounts to get a code that would give her the chance to buy tickets at face value through Ticketmaster’s presale, she was unsuccessful. On the resale market, nosebleed-seat tickets behind the stage are already listed for thousands of dollars. “People are taking advantage of fans and their vulnerability because people like me who have been fans of Taylor for so, so long would do genuinely anything just to be inside that stadium,” Miller, who is currently in an accelerated nursing degree program in Cleveland, told CNN. The resellers are price gouging the fans, she said. The term has been used a lot lately to describe so much more than just hiking gasoline prices during a hurricane. At the core of the increasingly common accusation of price gouging is the sense that the consumer is being exploited. But it’s not as cut and dry as you may think. In fact, economists — and even President Joe Biden — can’t agree on a definition of it. But there’s one thing everyone agrees on: Just about everything costs more than it used to a few years ago, a consequence of inflation. Although the pace of price increases has cooled substantially, we’re still paying more.