Instacart’s AI-Enabled Pricing Experiments May Be Inflating Your Grocery Bill, CR and Groundwork Collaborative Investigation Finds

Kravitz, Derek. “Instacart’s AI-Enabled Pricing Experiments May Be Inflating Your Grocery Bill, CR and Groundwork Collaborative Investigation Finds.” Consumer Reports, 9 Dec. 2025, www.consumerreports.org/money/questionable-business-practices/instacart-ai-pricing-experiment-inflating-grocery-bills-a1142182490/. Accessed Feb. 2026.

In this article from investigative reporter Derek Kravitz, Consumer Reports worked with Groundwork Collaborative and More Perfect Union to investigate variations in pricing from Instacart. This article was interesting to me because I had previously heard rumor of dynamic pricing systems coming into grocery stores like Kroger or Walmart and how that might impact shoppers.

During their investigation, the researchers had participants use Instacart and add the same specific items to their carts to see if there was any variation in the prices and total cost of groceries from one person to another. The researchers discovered that even with the same exact items, from the same retailers, in the same place and time frame, participants still yielded different totals and prices from Instacart.

The way this relates to AI, is that AI is being used in developing this dynamic pricing technology that determines how much customers will pay for certain items, based on a number of different details it gathers. “Retailers are now using AI and other technologies to create detailed profiles on their customers, with the potential to personalize prices and discounts down to the individual shopper.”