Instacart Markups Exposed: Stop AI Price Hikes on Your Cart
Instacart’s AI Price Shuffle Could Cost Shoppers $1,200 a Year
Grocery shopping has always had its surprises—sometimes you find a sale, sometimes you don’t. But for Instacart customers, those surprises are becoming far less random and a lot more expensive.
Consumer Reports and the progressive think tank Groundwork Collaborative released a study yesterday that exposes just how much AI-powered pricing could impact your wallet. The experiment involved ~200 volunteers across four U.S. cities, who all checked prices for the same 20 grocery items at stores like Costco, Kroger, Safeway, and Target. The result? About 75% of the items had different prices for different shoppers—even though everyone was choosing the same product from the same store at the same time.
Instacart, the online grocery giant, has quietly shifted the mantra from “Yesterday’s price is not today’s price” to “Today’s price might not be the same price for everyone.” The company uses pricing tools from Eversight, an AI firm it acquired in 2022, that can inflate prices by as much as 23% for some shoppers. According to Consumer Reports, that could cost households an extra $1,200 per year, while boosting store profits by 2–5%.
Emails leaked during the study revealed that Instacart was actively testing customers’ price sensitivity, a practice Costco internally referred to as “smart rounding.” Experts say this type of dynamic pricing—already spreading in the AI age—could make everyday essentials significantly more expensive.
Instacart isn’t slowing down its AI ambitions. In a partnership with OpenAI, the company now lets customers generate recipes in ChatGPT and pay for groceries without leaving the chat interface. The convenience is undeniable—but as AI gets more sophisticated, the price you see may no longer be the price your neighbor pays.
For consumers, the lesson is clear: know what you’re paying before you hit checkout. In an era where your grocery list is being algorithmically priced, yesterday’s shopping habits may no longer be a reliable guide.