A collaborative report from Consumer Reports, Groundwork Collaborative and More Perfect Union has uncovered pricing experiments within the Instacart app that yielded higher or lower prices for different users on the exact same items from the same store location.
The organizations partnered to enroll 437 shoppers in an experiment across four cities, where each shopper added the same items to their carts within Instacart from the exact same store. Almost 75 percent of grocery items were shown to shoppers at multiple price points, with as many as five different prices shown for the same item. The average difference between the highest and lowest price shown was 13 percent, while the highest delta on an individual item was a whopping 23 percent.
Engadget reached out to Instacart and received the following response. It reads in part: “Just as retailers have long tested prices in their physical stores to better understand consumer preferences, a subset of only 10 retail partners — ones that already apply markups — do the same online via Instacart. These limited, short-term, and randomized tests help retail partners learn what matters most to consumers and how to keep essential items affordable.” An Instacart spokesperson added that this is not dynamic pricing (insofar as it is not based on supply and demand), that no personal demographic data is used in the process and that these experiments are random.
The bulk of the tests were conducted at Safeway and Target stores, which both yielded similar results. A Target spokesperson told the New York Times that the company “is not affiliated with Instacart and is not responsible for prices on the Instacart platform.” Instacart told the Times that they were “evaluating different approaches” to cover the platform’s costs at the time of the study, but have since discontinued pricing tests on Target orders.
Instacart published a blog post today attempting to explain how these tests that showed higher prices are actually meant to help retailers invest in lower prices. It also waxes poetic about Instacart’s commitments to affordable groceries for consumers.
