Popular food delivery service Instacart has been using a shady algorithm that charges different prices to different customers on the same grocery items in the same supermarkets without telling them, according to an explosive study.
At a Target store in North Canton, Ohio, the wildly popular grocery app charged a customer $2.99 for Skippy Creamy Peanut Butter one day in September – while other Instacart users that day paid as much as $3.59 for the same jar picked up from the same location, according to the study.
At a Safeway supermarket in Seattle, shoppers using Instacart paid five different prices for the same Oscar Mayer Deli Turkey: $3.99, $4.31, $4.59, $4.69 and $4.89 — a range that spanned a whopping 23% between the lowest and highest markup.
The same pattern emerged at Target and Safeway stores across four cities, according to Groundwork Collaborative and Consumer Reports, which used 437 shoppers in its survey, ordering groceries off the Instacart app for in-store pickup.
It’s the latest example of so-called “dynamic pricing” — the hated practice introduced more than a decade ago by Uber and Lyft, hiking prices for rides during rainstorms — that is nickel-and-diming consumers, even as relentless inflation has sparked an affordability crisis.