Instacart — the online grocery delivery platform — was caught charging customers different prices for the same goods bought at the same time from the same stores. But an Instacart spokesperson wanted Labor Press readers to know that was just a one-time price-optimization experiment, and that those price differences didn’t rely on customers’ personal information, a practice that’s been dubbed “surveillance pricing.”
Portland City Council is considering an ordinance to ban retailers from using surveillance pricing — or its close cousin “dynamic pricing,” in which prices rise or fall more than once a day depending on factors like demand or weather.
Reporting on that proposed ordinance in our Sept. 18 issue, the Labor Press mentioned an investigation of Instacart that Consumer Reports published in December 2025.
To find out if Instacart was simultaneously charging different prices to consumers, Consumer Reports teamed up with the nonprofit think tank Groundwork Collaborative and the nonprofit media organization More Perfect Union. That suspicion had been fueled by the fact that Instacart had promoted an algorithmic price-setting feature in its marketing to grocery companies and in reports to its investors. So over five months, more than 400 volunteers worked with researchers to conduct simultaneous online shopping sessions and document what prices were charged for the same products at the same Albertsons, Costco, Kroger, Safeway, and Target stores.
After Instacart was contacted by More Perfect Union, the company removed a section of its web site that offered a “price optimization” feature to its grocery partners. “Fully unlock the potential of (electronic shelf labels’) instant and accurate pricing changes with dynamic price and promotion optimization strategies at the shelf,” Instacart said, before that verbiage was scrubbed from its site. Instacart told More Perfect Union that it had been the grocery companies’ decision to charge different prices, as part of a price experiment. But when researchers contacted Target, the company said it had no relationship with Instacart; Instacart itself had charged the different prices.
The way the Labor Press summarized the Consumer Reports study would reasonably lead readers to think that Instacart had based its pricing on personal data about individual customers. It’s illegal to charge more based on demographic factors like age, sex, household size, and household income. And in the Consumer Reports study, those factors did not seem to explain the price differences.
On the Sept. 17 episode of The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart, Lindsay Owens of Groundwork Collaborative acknowledged that the study di not find personalized or surveillance pricing.
But the fact that the capability exists is driving ordinances like the one proposed in Portland.
MORE More Perfect Union’s Instacart exposé got 4.7 million views. Watch it here:
