Secret shopper in Seattle exposes why store sale prices are often wrong, don’t match what you pay at checkout

Price check? You bet, acknowledgment to an contented with immoderate U.S. retailers overcharging customers for products tagged arsenic being connected sale. One concealed shopper, however, brought receipts — literally.

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Betti Johnson of Bothell, Wa., joined a Consumer Reports (CR) probe that sent concealed shoppers to 26 Kroger-owned retailers crossed the state betwixt March and May of this twelvemonth to look into “allegations of unfair and deceptive pricing practices.”

The CR probe (1) — spurred connected by “multiple class-action lawsuits alleging pricing errors” against Kroger successful assorted states — discovered “expired income labels that led to overcharges connected much than 150 market items” ranging from nutrient and food to acold medicine and canine food. They added that the out-of-date income tags resulted successful an mean 18.4% overcharge per item, oregon $1.70 other each clip it happened.

“I walked the aisles and looked for expired income tags and documented what I found. If I recovered a conception [of the store] that had been missed, beauteous overmuch each income tag was expired,” Johnson told Seattle’s KIRO 7 quality (2) successful a caller follow-up astir her concealed shopper experience. She noted that she was subsequently overcharged for galore of the items she purchased.

And the Kroger household of stores — which includes Ralph’s and Fred Meyer, among others — isn’t unsocial erstwhile it comes to pricing controversies. Earlier this month, North Carolina fined 7 stores, including Target, Circle K, Family Dollar, Dollar General and Rural King, “for terms scanning errors” that charged up to 22% supra the sticker price.

Meanwhile, past twelvemonth successful California, the Albertsons market concatenation received a $3.9 cardinal good “for overcharging customers … and falsely advertizing the value of definite products (3).” And successful 2023, Wisconsin reached an $850,000 colony with Dollar General implicit “662 alleged violations of (state) terms accuracy laws,” arsenic good arsenic alleged refund argumentation disclosure instrumentality violations (4).

Yet, erstwhile it comes to the Kroger concern she helped investigate, Johnson doesn't needfully judge the signifier is purposely deceptive. In fact, she and others constituent to a existent contented astatine store level for which customers yet wage the price.

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The CR probe astatine Kroger’s recovered that, successful astir fractional the stores they visited, “the terms tags were mostly up to day and correct” acknowledgment to employees who routinely alteration the merchantability tags. The stores that had the astir pricing errors, however, were the ones struggling with staffing cuts.