Same Cart, Different Price: Instacart’s Price Experiments Cost Families at Checkout

The proliferation of new pricing practices and technologies has upended pricing transparency. Fair pricing is no longer a guarantee in the cereal aisle or anywhere else. Our research suggests that companies like Instacart — the focus of this study — are developing, acquiring, and perfecting technology to experiment with pricing, at scale. These new strategies are pervasive in the growing online grocery sector, with $10 billion in sales in a single month in 2025 and more than 60% of U.S. households reporting they have purchased groceries online. At a time when food price inflation outpaces overall inflation, and Americans report that the price of groceries is their number one cost concern, pricing experiments used by companies like Instacart are making the situation worse. To determine if Instacart is experimenting with pricing, and if so, just how costly it is for shoppers, Groundwork Collaborative, Consumer Reports, and More Perfect Union conducted an independent experiment involving 437 shoppers in live tests across four cities. Researchers assisted shoppers in simultaneously adding items from a specific grocery store to their Instacart shopping carts, but they stopped short of making the purchase. Researchers measured the prices displayed to each shopper and how much those prices varied from one shopper to the next. The results demonstrate how companies could quietly and opaquely charge different customers different prices for the same groceries.