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Instacart has been charging customers different prices for the same products, despite the items being picked up from the same store.
While customers have at times suspected that something was amiss with Instacart prices, the inconsistent pricing was revealed in a study published this week by Groundwork Collaborative, Consumer Reports, and More Perfect Union.
The study involved 437 volunteers in a live test across four cities. Participants were instructed to add specific items from a designated store to their cart, but stop before checking out.
Results showed that almost 74% of the items added to the cart had varying prices. For example, shoppers who grabbed a dozen Lucerne eggs from a Safeway store in Washington, DC, were shown different prices: $3.99, $4.28, $4.59, $4.69, and $4.79. In another example, a basket of groceries from a Target store in Ohio showed prices ranging from $84.43 to $90.47.
On the items chosen for the survey, the average price difference between the lowest and highest price was 13%. Applying a variation of 7% to the amount ($363) that Instacart says an American household of four spends per month on groceries, the cost swing would be around $1,200 per year, the study finds.
In response, Instacart said that the products are part of a price-testing experiment it is conducting with retail partners.
"Just as retailers have long tested prices in their physical stores to better understand consumer preferences, a subset of only 10 retail partners—ones that already apply markups—do the same online via Instacart," the company said. "These limited, short-term, and randomized tests help retail partners learn what matters most to consumers and how to keep essential items affordable."
Target, however, denied any participation. "Target is not affiliated with Instacart and is not responsible for prices on the Instacart platform," the retailer tells The New York Post. Later, Instacart said that it had discontinued tests at Target.
Instacart is using its AI-powered pricing tool, Eversight, to run these experiments. It insists they are "not dynamic pricing [since] prices never change in real-time, including in response to supply and demand." They also "never use personal, demographic, or user-level behavioral data" and "are not designed to increase the average markup set by a retail partner," Instacart says.
"For any given shopper in any given store, prices only change on a few of the products they shop [for] and only by a small margin; it’s negligible," it says on the Eversight page. However, with nearly half of Americans saying that grocery prices are a major source of financial stress at the moment, random price swings can make it hard to budget.