Last August, Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bob Casey launched an investigation into allegations of surge pricing at Kroger. Kroger uses digital price tags in approximately 500 of their US stores. Their reasoning was to “save labor costs” which means they didn’t want to pay an employee to do it. The controversy was that Kroger could potentially use the digital price tags to adjust the cost of certain items based on factors like time of day, demand, weather, etc. I know; it’s very surprising that a big company would try to take advantage of its customers.
Last year, Walmart was hit with a class action suit when a man discovered stores in at least six states were charging 10-15% more than the sticker price on the shelf. Someone at Kroger must have heard about that and went, “Hold my beer” because the company is now being investigated by several states for checkout prices as high as 60% more than the price on the shelf.
Derek and Allison Hadfield became more and more fed up whenever they shopped for their family of four at their local Kroger grocery in Belpre, Ohio, a town of about 6,600 across the Ohio River from West Virginia. When they tried to save money by buying items on sale, they said, many of the discounts vanished when Kroger rang up their carts at checkout. Personal pizzas posted as on sale for $1 a piece rang up for $1.25 each. An 8oz jar of minced garlic listed at the low price of $2.49 cost $3.99 at checkout – a 60% jump.
“Almost every single time I go in the store, the listed price of an item is NOT what rings up at the register,” Allison Hadfield, who home-schools the couple’s two children, wrote in December in a complaint to Ohio’s attorney general. “I want Kroger to stop screwing over people especially when they are the only store in town!”
The family’s experiences are not an isolated problem involving a single store, an investigation of the supermarket giant’s pricing practices by the Guardian US, Consumer Reports and the Food & Environment Reporting Network has found. Kroger stores in multiple states, the investigation has revealed, show a pattern of overcharging customers by frequently listing expired sale prices on the shelves and then ringing up the regular prices at checkout – a practice that adds additional burdens on to American families already struggling under the weight of the soaring costs for eggs, meat and other groceries.
The investigation drew on “secret shopper” tests in more than a dozen states by the Guardian and its partners as well as a separate series of tests by union grocery workers in Colorado. The investigation also drew on internal corporate documents, court records, complaints to government authorities and interviews with customers, workers and union officials.
The shopping tests by the media partners found expired tags that resulted in overcharges in 14 of the 26 stores reviewed in Washington DC and 14 states, including Arizona, Michigan, Oregon, Virginia and Ohio. The tests in March, April and May identified more than 150 items with expired sale tags for which Kroger was charging more than the sale price – producing average overcharges of about $1.70 per item, an 18% markup over the discount price.
On average, the expired discount tags the tests analyzed were about two weeks out of date, suggesting that thousands of customers ended up paying more for what they likely thought were discounted items.
At times, Kroger’s sale tags don’t clearly disclose that a discount offer has ended. In some instances expiration dates are listed in small print and in others they are noted in a corporate code that is not clear to people who are not Kroger employees. Some customers catch the problem at checkout or when they go over their receipts, but workers and union officials said many busy shoppers don’t notice the overcharges.
“It really makes me feel bad because some of them are on fixed incomes and they’re older. They’re not going to pay attention,” said Joy Alexander, who works as a scan coordinator at a Kroger-owned King Soopers store in suburban Denver. “They think that when they took it off the shelf, it was $2.50. They don’t know that they’re paying $3.75 for that one item.”
Kroger, the nation’s second largest grocery retailer behind Walmart, is headquartered in Cincinnati and operates more than 2,700 stores in 35 states under a variety of names, including King Soopers, Harris Teeter, Ralphs, Fry’s Food and Drug, and others.
In a statement, Kroger said the price tag errors identified by the news organizations represented “a few dozen examples across several years out of billions of customer transactions annually”.
“While any error is unacceptable, the characterization of widespread pricing concerns is patently false,” the statement said.
Kroger did not provide detailed answers to most of the media partners’ questions about its pricing practices. The statement said the company is “committed to affordable and accurate pricing” and that it regularly conducts price checks that review “millions of items weekly to ensure our shelf prices are accurate”.
With food costs soaring from the grocery aisle to the drive-through window, Americans are spending a greater portion of their income to eat than they have in decades. US food prices climbed nearly 24% from 2020 to 2024, leaving many Americans feeling angry, anxious or dejected about their trips to the supermarket.
Shame on Kroger for doing this. It’s especially heinous when they’re the only store in town and people don’t have any other options. Even if they aren’t the only option, Kroger probably figures they can get away with doing this because people aren’t paying attention. It’s only after they look at the receipt that they may notice something is off. It’s both appalling and ballsy to do this during a time when the cost of groceries is a huge issue. Beyond their flagship stores, Kroger owns Ralph’s, Harris Teeter, Dillion’s, and more. Even if you’re not shopping at one of their stores, here’s your reminder to always check your receipts!
The full article is much longer than what I excerpted, but it’s really worth the read. The states that are currently investigating or taking action against Kroger are Ohio, Colorado, California, Illinois, and Michigan. They recently settled a lawsuit with the state of Utah, but have had complaints made against them in other states. For example, someone in Arlington, Texas reported that price tags at their local Kroger were five years out of date. Companies shouldn’t be allowed to do this. At what point will there be an actual reckoning?