Overview
- A joint investigation by Consumer Reports, Groundwork Collaborative, and More Perfect Union enlisted 437 volunteers who added identical items from the same stores at the same time and saw different prices inside the Instacart app.
- Nearly 74% of products showed multiple prices—sometimes up to five—with an average item-level spread of 13% and a maximum difference of 23% between the highest and lowest price.
- Across full baskets, totals varied by about 7%, which researchers estimate could cost a typical family of four roughly $1,200 a year if consistently shown higher tiers.
- Instacart attributes the findings to limited, short-term, randomized tests run by about 10 retail partners using its Eversight tools, says the tests are not real-time dynamic pricing and do not use personal or demographic data, and has ended pricing tests on Target orders.
- Researchers also found evidence of price experimentation on Instacart for Albertsons, Costco, Kroger, and Sprouts; Target says it is not affiliated with Instacart or responsible for prices shown on the platform.