Talking Carts 4: Instacart’s AI Pricing Experiment
Inside the investigation into the online marketplace that could be driving up your grocery bill
Main theme: In this podcast episode, hosts Tanya Christian and Brian Vines look at a surprising reason your grocery bills may be going up.
A recent CR investigation—put together with two other nonprofits, Groundwork Collaborative and More Perfect Union—found that Instacart is conducting artificial intelligence-enabled price experiments on its customers. These "algorithmic pricing” experiments involve giving different prices to different customers for the same goods at the same store at the same time. Sometimes the prices differ by as much as 23 percent per item.
The co-hosts are joined by CR investigative reporter Derek Kravitz, who explains what Instacart is up to and why consumer advocates say the company seems to be creeping closer and closer to an even more problematic practice known as “surveillance pricing.”
The conversation goes beyond Instacart, exploring how technology is transforming the supermarket landscape for all consumers, from loyalty programs that use demographic data to parcel out deals to the potential of electronic shelf labels changing prices in real time.
The conversation also delves into the current lack of federal regulation of AI-enabled pricing and gives tips on how to navigate the new, algorithm-enabled grocery store.
Graphic: Consumer Reports Graphic: Consumer Reports
How to Listen
“Talking Carts with Consumer Reports” episodes are available on CR’s video hub and through Apple Podcasts, Spotify (log-in required), and video on YouTube.
Correction: This article has been updated to note that in CR’s Instacart investigation, the largest per-item pricing difference found was 23 percent.
