Are Instacart’s Pricing Experiments Unethical?

In a recent study conducted by Consumer Reports and Groundwork Collaborative — part of a larger project with More Perfect Union — the resultant data suggested that Instacart shoppers were being subjected to AI-driven algorithmic pricing experiments without their knowledge.

The study, involving 437 shoppers in live tests across four cities — and later, a targeted in-person control group vs. Instacart shopping test held in Washington, D.C. — found the following:

“Almost three quarters (74%) of grocery items in the experiment were offered to shoppers at multiple price points on Instacart. The platform offered as many as five different sales prices for the exact same grocery item, in the exact same store, at the exact same time,” Groundwork stated in an executive summary.

“Of those items that we found Instacart experimented on, the average difference between the lowest and highest prices was 13%. Some shoppers found grocery prices that were up to 23% higher than prices available to other shoppers for the exact same items, in the exact same store, at the exact same time… Researchers found that overall Instacart basket totals varied by an average of about 7% for the exact same items from the exact same locations, at the exact same time,” the summary added.

And as Consumer Reports investigative reporter Derek Kravitz underscored, Instacart itself had admitted to conducting pricing experiments in corporate marketing and investor materials, suggesting that “shoppers are not aware that they’re in an experiment,” yet also that the price differences were “negligible.”

The pertinent text of Instacart’s description of its dynamic pricing tool, Eversight, reads as follows:

“End shoppers are not aware that they’re in an experiment. For any given shopper in any given store, prices only change on a few of the products they shop and only by a small margin; it’s negligible. But at scale across a store network, those small changes create an orthogonal array of data points that changes the game.”

Among the 10 retailers involved specifically, per CR, were Albertsons, Costco, Kroger, Safeway, Sprouts Farmers Market, and Target. These 10 retailers were the only ones using Eversight tools via Instacart, according to the company itself, although it declined to share names or what the percentage of customers involved in price experiments on the platform.

Instacart’s Price Experiments Not ‘Dynamic,’ While Target Distances Itself

In statements offered to both CR and Groundwork when asked for comment over the study’s findings, Instacart claimed that its tests are aimed at helping retailers “learn what matters most to consumers,” that the price experiments were randomly assigned to customers — although CPG companies who use Instacart’s advertising product “may use behavioral data…to inform discounts or promotional offers” — and were never “dynamic.”

“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,” Instacart wrote in a statement to The New York Post.

In an email exchange between Instacart and Costco, accidentally forwarded to CR, Instacart and its partners were found to be attempting to determine the degree of price sensitivity exhibited by shoppers — or, as Kravitz framed it, “how high a retailer could raise the price of an item before customers decide not to buy it.”

Errol Schweizer — a grocery industry consultant who, while serving as an exec with Whole Foods, assisted in setting up the company’s partnership with Instacart — described Instacart’s latest efforts to bolster sales and maximize profit margins through data-driven leverage as a reaction to similar strategies enacted by Amazon and Walmart.

“This pricing gamesmanship, it’s all to keep pace with the competition and to wring a few more pennies out of people,” he said, as quoted by Kravitz.

“And as things get more competitive for grocers and suppliers, it’s going to get more and more complicated, wackier, and out of control for the customer. By the end, it’s predatory and manipulative,” Schweizer concluded.

At least one retailer attempted to distance itself from the report. Target stated it has no business relationship with Instacart, and “does not directly share any pricing information with Instacart or dictate what Instacart prices appear on their platform.”

In response, Instacart admitted to scraping Target’s publicly displayed prices and adding a surcharge for “operating and technology costs.” Instacart continued, according to CR, to note that they had been testing precisely how much to charge to cover these costs during the time frame wherein CR and Groundwork were conducting their study, but that those “tests have now ended.” Safeway (owned by Albertons), Costco, and Kroger did not respond to request for comment, while Sprouts declined to offer remarks.