Most people still think of grocery prices the way their grandparents did: one price, posted on the shelf, the same for everyone. But new research suggests that model is quietly disappearing. A recent investigation by Consumer Reports and the Groundwork Collaborative found that three-quarters of identical grocery items on Instacart carried different prices depending on who was looking. For the average household, those small differences could add up to more than a thousand dollars a year.
The researchers created fake shopper profiles and sent them into the same stores on Instacart at the same time. They weren't comparing sale prices or loyalty discounts. They were testing whether the platform's pricing engine was serving up different base prices to different people. In most cases, it was.
"Lindsey and the team wanted to look into Instacart because a few years ago, the shopping platform acquired the company Eversight. And Eversight uses AI to test prices. The researchers wanted to know if that was costing consumers money."
— Adrian Ma, Listen [2:07]
Within weeks of the report's release, Instacart announced it was ending the practice. A spokesperson told the show that shoppers "should not have to question the prices they see on their platform." The decision came quickly, but the questions it raised are sticking around.
To some economists, this kind of experimentation isn't new or particularly alarming. Brian Albrecht, chief economist at the International Center for Law and Economics, told the show he wasn't particularly bothered by the findings. Companies have long tested prices in different regions or at different times of day. The difference now is scale and precision: instead of broad experiments, algorithms can adjust prices for each individual in real time.
"But this got us thinking about how prices seem to be more in flux lately. We've heard a lot about things like price discrimination and price testing. So to help understand what was happening here and the difference between all these phrases, we called up BR Albrecht."
— Stephen Messaha, Listen [4:32]
The Instacart story is one data point in a larger shift. As more shopping moves online, the technical barriers to personalized pricing keep dropping. The old assumption—that the person next to you in the checkout line paid the same amount—may not hold in the aisles of the future. For now, at least one major platform has stepped back. But the tools that made the testing possible are still in place, waiting for the next experiment.