Instacart, Stop Using American Shoppers as Lab Rats During an Affordability Crisis |
Somewhere, a mom taps through her grocery app while waiting in the school pickup line, purchasing a box of Wheat Thins for $5.99. Across town, someone else scrolls through the same grocery app and adds the exact same box of Wheat Thins to their cart. For them, the crackers ring up at $6.99. It is the same item, from the same store, at the same time, but one unlucky shopper is stuck paying a higher price. Neither shopper has any idea this pricing game is even being played.
This is not a hypothetical scenario. Increasingly, it’s happening all over the country. Right now, grocery delivery app Instacart is conducting large-scale, hidden pricing experiments on unsuspecting shoppers to determine just how much money they can extract from customers on the groceries they buy to feed their families.
How do we know? Our team at Groundwork Collaborative had a feeling Instacart might be experimenting on shoppers, so we decided to run an experiment on them. Alongside our partners at Consumer Reports and More Perfect Union, we recruited over 400 volunteer secret shoppers to shop for the same basket of 20 items at the same grocery store at the same time. We ran the experiment in four different stores across the country.
The results were damning: At every store we tested, shoppers were charged different prices for an identical basket of groceries. Overall, Instacart basket totals varied by about 7%, with some items posting differences as high as 23%. For example: the exact same basket of groceries from a Safeway store in Seattle, Washington ran some shoppers $114.34, while other shoppers were charged $123.93. At a Target in North Canton, Ohio, prices varied by as much as $6, as some shoppers rang up a total of $84.43, while others were charged $87.91 or as much as $90.47.
Unfortunately, Instacart’s predatory pricing is just one small piece of a much larger–and rapidly growing–economy of extraction.
Based on the company’s own estimates, this “Instacart tax” could drain as much as $1,200 from American households’ pocketbooks each year.
Meanwhile, Instacart is gloating about their ability to use unaware shoppers as guinea pigs to pad their bottom line profits. On their website, the company notes that, “End shoppers are not aware that they’re in an experiment. For any given shopper in any given store, prices only change on a few of the products they shop and only by a small margin; it’s negligible.” But we’re facing the greatest food affordability crisis in a generation. As grocery prices continue to rise and reliance on........