As plenty of folks in the U.S. are aware, grocery prices are on the rise. It’s a main pain point for politicians and consumers alike.
So it makes sense that when a good deal is advertised and groceries are on sale – that’s the time to buy, right? Well, a new investigation by Consumer Reports found that the grocery chain Kroger, which has a big Texas footprint, was advertising sale prices – but charging full price at checkout.
Derek Kravitz, an investigative reporter for Consumer Reports who authored this deep dive, joined the Standard with more.
This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:
Texas Standard: Tell us a little bit about this investigation: What grocery chain are we talking about, and how’d you do the exploring?
Derek Kravitz: We’re talking about Kroger, one of the nation’s largest grocery chains. They operate in 35 states, including Texas, and the District of Columbia.
We started this investigation with the Guardian and the Food and Environment Reporting Network after hearing from King Soopers employees – which is owned by Kroger in Colorado – who are currently in labor negotiations with Kroger Corporate, to explain what they were seeing, which was price tag errors on sales items across that state.
So we wanted to see if those errors were elsewhere in the country. And so we sent folks to 26 different Kroger stores across the country
What did you find? Was there something common as you looked at all these stores?
Yeah, so in about half the stores we checked, we saw consistent and frequent price tag errors on sales items. And the average overcharge we were seeing was $1.70 per item, or about 18%. And that adds up quickly for American families.
The out of date or expired tags, some of them were as old as three months old, and that means they had been sitting there for that long. And anyone who bought those items probably paid full price at the register.
How’s this happening?
So when we spoke to Kroger employees and then also went through consumer complaints with state attorneys general and went through federal OSHA data, staffing appears to be the single most important reason for why we’re seeing this.
This is also not a new phenomenon; other grocery chains have struggled with this. There have been the class-action lawsuits and state regulator investigations and fines involving Walmart, Safeway, Vons, Albertsons, you name it.
So Kroger is not alone, but they have been cutting staff and hours since the pandemic. And when we spoke to Kroger employees, they say that’s the single most important reason why this is happening.
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Well, as you’re probably aware, Kroger has taken issue with your findings, saying the investigation overstates the pricing issues. In the words of an email sent to CBS Money Watch, which was covering this story, they said, “the characterization of widespread pricing concerns is patently false.”
I know I’ve had to call out pricing mistakes plenty of times at certain other well-known supermarkets; you know, coupons don’t work sometimes. But I don’t think it’s something sinister – I mean, it didn’t get loaded right into the store computer.
Is it fair to single out Kroger or create the impression they’re ripping people off?
So three things there. One, Kroger, again, is very large. Second largest grocery chain in the United States. 2,700 plus stores. In many places in the country, including in parts of Texas, it is one of the few, if only, available options for people in a several-mile radius. So that’s why we looked at Kroger so closely.
Two, we didn’t just look at our own data. We looked at obviously, the Colorado data, but then we also went through consumer complaints in multiple states and the Federal Trade Commission to see if this pattern had been happening since 2019, when corporate employees say that it started, and it matched.
And then we went a step further and we looked at staffing data that the Occupational Safety and Health Administration collects each and every year for each and every store in the United States. It is a lot of data. We went through it for every store that we looked at, and there was a correlation between the staffing levels and the staffing cuts at stores and the level of price error we were seeing on tags.
So, you know, nothing is definitive. This is human error, right? But we also got internal company documents that points to Kroger executives being very aware of this problem dating back years. And acknowledging that it’s a problem and a problem that he needed to fix was the exact quote from an email that we got.
Derek, you have a situation, though, where you got the tip off from a player in a labor dispute. Are you concerned about sort of being used in a sense in this dispute?
So the three news partners in this, Consumer Reports, Food and Environment Reporting Network, and The Guardian, we’re investigative journalists. And so we approached this from a scientific method standpoint.
We basically throw out the Colorado findings because we can’t use them, right? To your point, they’re a little bit biased. So we wanted to validate those findings. We wanted to see if those findings were correct in other places.
So we had to do the work ourselves. Only taking those steps and only going through this exhaustive analysis and only sharing all of our findings and all of data and all our questions to Kroger weeks in advance. This is the only way to conduct a fair investigation and a fair report. And we did that.
What happens now, and what can consumers do to make sure that they’re not getting overcharged?
So two things: One, you can certainly take photos of price tags when you’re shopping and compare it to checkout, the receipt, digital receipt or paper receipt. That’s very labor intensive. That’s a lot of time, especially if you’re shopping for multiple people and doing so weekly.
So, you know, that’s a a lot to ask, but if you really wanna be careful and make sure that you’re paying what you see on price tags, that’s probably the best way, and that cuts across, not just Kroger, but any retail merchant.
But separately, if you run into this problem and it’s, say, days or weeks later, you can certainly complain. There are two regulators that look at this pretty closely. One are state attorneys general. They usually work in consultation with departments of agriculture and weights and measures divisions to see if there are errors and then fine companies if there are repeated errors or violations.
And then separately, the Federal Trade Commission regulates grocery stores and supermarkets, and when they get complaints they log them and work with state regulators to try to solve those problems.
