If I had to guess, my answer would be “yes.” Why wouldn’t they? If Big Pharma is willing to push dangerous drugs and injections on people and swear up and down they are “Safe and Effective” while those same drugs and injections are quite literally killing people, it is easy to imagine than another big, greedy corporate entity would manipulate prices to drive up their profits. This claim is not the least bit hard to believe. In this day and age, perhaps what they’re doing cannot be considered that bad. After all, they might say, “We’re not killing people like Big Pharma is, right?”
When I first heard about this story I did not hear the word Instacart right away but when it was mentioned it all made sense. At first they talked about how people are being charged different prices for the same exact product in grocery stores. Apparently some kind of algorithm had been developed that determined each person’s ability to pay based on personal information that the retailer had collected about them. Sounds like another good reason to safeguard your personal information as well as you can, but that’s another topic.
Up until this point, the story still had me scratching my head since I still had not heard Instacart mentioned. How, I wondered, were stores able to charge different prices for different consumers when the prices are always known to shoppers when they shop? Prices are always prominently displayed and that’s a pretty solid requirement for any retailer. Who in the world would take something off a store shelf without knowing how much it will cost? Yeah, pretty much nobody.
When the story finally got around to mentioning Instacart (it was not the story from the attached video), it all made sense. The “gig workers” Instacart employs to go into stores do not take the time to look at prices. Imagine how much it would slow them down if they had to take a picture of the price that is displayed or otherwise record it for each product they select for the customer.
You might wonder — as I did — if the Instacart shoppers supply their customers with the printed store receipts from their shopping activities. That would probably tip off at least a few consumers that something shady was going on but apparently, Instacart shoppers are very careful to not supply the customer with a store receipt. I queried AI on that topic and this was the reply:
Instacart shoppers do not give customers the printed store receipt from the physical grocery store. Per official Instacart policy (outlined in their shopper guidelines and fulfillment docs), the shopper must retain the paper receipt for potential returns, audits, or disputes—explicitly instructing them not to hand it over or leave it in bags, with risk of deactivation for violations. Instead, customers receive only a digital receipt via email or the app’s order history, which reflects the personalized/experimental prices plus Instacart’s fees, service charges, and taxes—but omits direct comparison to in-store pricing.
Well, isn’t that convenient? That sets the stage nicely for the alleged price manipulation, doesn’t it?
I guess it might be a while before we hear a final verdict on this story. Instacart, as expected, followed the usual corporate script that big, greedy companies follow when they get caught doing something they ought not do: “What? Us? Seriously? We would never do such a thing! How dare you even insinuate we would do something so rotten? Out top priority is our customers satisfaction, happiness and access to fluffy puppies and kittens to pet and love at all times!”
Oh, sorry, that was actually my translation of what the company actually said. First they claim that these adjustments to pricing are simply standard industry practices to help retailers optimize pricing. “Optimize,” by the way is just a not-so-clever way of saying, “raise as high as possible.” They go on to say: “Some consumers may see slightly higher prices for certain items and lower prices for others; however, most customers see the standard price.” The company added that experiments “don’t use any personal or demographic data” (yeah, right) and that customers are “randomly assigned to price test cohorts by product category and location.”
I do wonder if this discovery will put the kibosh on this “standard industry practice” going forward. I do not doubt it was a “test” since it is not hard for me to believe they wanted to try it out to see if anyone noticed. If no one noticed, I suspected they would have rolled it out fully in the future and happily manipulated prices consumers paid based on what their algorithm determined as the maximum price individual consumers would be willing to pay for a product. But they got caught and now I suspect that plan is in serious jeopardy.
With food inflation showing no signs of easing up any time soon, isn’t it nice that wealthy executives in big companies are racking their brains trying to figure out how to squeeze more money out of struggling consumers so they can add a few more million to their bottom line?
This whole scandal demonstrates once again that you cannot turn your back on big, greedy corporate entities. When consumers decided to take advantage of a service that made their life a little more convenient they put their trust in another big company to do right by them they gave up a measure of control in order to do so. Not only did consumers end up having to pay more for their shopping excursions due to the extra charge that Instacart understandably charges for the service but many of them were also getting screwed with these price manipulations.
We have not heard the last about this scandal. More will come out in the future and my bet is that Instacart was indeed manipulating prices for the sole purpose of boosting profits and I expect that the retail outlets were in on it as well.
Shopping might be a little inconvenient at times but if you want to know what you are paying for the things you buy, you really should just go out and do it for yourself.
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