Instacart Users Track Rising Grocery Prices With ‘Reorder Items’ Feature

Traditional paper receipts are increasingly becoming redundant in grocery shops across the U.S. due to the rising popularity of app-based ordering and tracking systems.

Many shoppers discard their old grocery receipts; however, platforms such as Instacart retain detailed order histories for extended periods.

Currently, certain customers are looking into how inflation uniquely impacts their spending habits by reviewing their past purchases.

A 33-year-old escape-room installer, Crisman White, from Virginia says the cost for a basket of groceries from his local Publix is twice as much as in October 2019.

On TikTok, White uploaded a video documenting his use of Instacart’s “reorder items” feature, revealing how over the last five years, a $35 purchase had ballooned to more than $62.

He said, “I went back to my first Instacart because that was the only thing that I could really track exactly what I purchased.”

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Prompted by a TikTok user’s statement that their Walmart+ bill had tripled over two years, White took it upon himself to verify the statement. Users on the platform speculated that the application may have replaced items that were not available with pricier options sourced from third-party sellers.

Although recent months have seen an evident downturn in price hikes, the overall inflation rate for the past five years stands at roughly 23%. This means an item previously priced at $1 costs approximately $1.23 now.

This percentage reflects a wide variety of spending categories, but grocery prices have seen especially uneven increases over the same time frame. Coupled with shrinkflation, matching the contents of a previous shopping cart on a unit-per-dollar basis can be quite challenging.

White said, “A lot of the items either have changed names, or the quantity or the weight has changed, so it doesn’t exactly translate. So I actually had to go through each individual item and place it into my cart.”