Overview
- A consortium led by Consumer Reports, Groundwork Collaborative, and More Perfect Union coordinated 437 simultaneous Instacart shopping sessions across major retailers to capture price discrepancies for the same items at the same time.
- Researchers documented average item-level variation around 7% with gaps as high as 23%, including examples where identical carts at the same store differed by several dollars.
- Instacart said the pricing experiments were short-term and randomized for a subset of partners, stated they were not based on personal or behavioral characteristics, and confirmed tests have ended for Target and Costco storefronts.
- Target said it does not set or share prices for Instacart’s platform and described no direct relationship, while Instacart said it uses publicly available Target prices and tests ways of applying cost offsets for its services.
- New York now requires disclosures about algorithmic pricing, and the Instacart app there notifies users that certain prices may vary due to randomized tests and that an algorithm used personal data, as lawmakers push broader limits on individualized pricing.