Same Product, Same Store, but on Instacart, Prices Might Differ (nytimes.com)
- Reference: 0180354905
- News link: https://slashdot.org/story/25/12/10/1513248/same-product-same-store-but-on-instacart-prices-might-differ
- Source link: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/09/business/instacart-algorithmic-pricing.html
An Instacart spokeswoman said retailers on its platform set their own prices and that some run short-term, randomized pricing tests. The company said tests were "never based on personal or behavioral characteristics." Instacart acquired Eversight, an AI-driven pricing optimization company, in 2022. A Target spokesman said the company is not affiliated with Instacart and bears no responsibility for prices on the platform. Safeway and parent company Albertson's declined to comment.
[1] https://groundworkcollaborative.org/work/instacart/
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/09/business/instacart-algorithmic-pricing.html
Exploitable? (Score:2)
Is this exploitable? Can you provide the algorithm with certain inputs to obtain lower prices? Let the hacking begin!
Re:Exploitable? (Score:4, Interesting)
The lower prices are still too high. It's a price maximization test, not a market optimization.
Re: (Score:2)
If they're being honest (fat chance of that) about it being random then the only input is repeated refreshing until you get a lower price.
If it's tied to anything external all you can do is try to hide your identity or pretend to be whatever gets the lowest prices. Really good tracking or detailed profiles might be hard to get around, but I suspect most approaches are still rather naive. This isn't anything new. Some years ago there was a big story about airfare prices being different depending on what b
they markup the in store price so maybe not (Score:2)
they markup the in store price so maybe not
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
It is always cheaper in person at the store. Instacart has a mark up, plus fees. Unless you can somehow find loss leaders on Instacart, just show up at the store yourself for the best price.
I do find Instacart's inventory helpful - Instacart seems to know every store's inventory. If I want to know which store has something right now I check Instacart's inventory and then go to the store myself.
Caveat Emptor (Score:3, Interesting)
The best thing is, if you never go into the store, you'll never know! What a great scam. Bravo.
$100 more for a TV if you're in the parking lot... (Score:4, Informative)
> For example, the Target app charged people $100 more for a t.v. when a person was in a Target parking lot versus when in another location because it appeared to determine people would pay higher prices the closer they were to the store.
[1]https://consumerwatchdog.org/privacy/new-report-details-how-companies-use-surveillance-to-charge-different-prices-for-the-same-item/ [consumerwatchdog.org]
[1] https://consumerwatchdog.org/privacy/new-report-details-how-companies-use-surveillance-to-charge-different-prices-for-the-same-item/
Punishing people as usual (Score:2)
Those who can't physically get to the store whether due to disability or transport issues have to pay the extra margins. As someone who relies on delivery a lot I notice the extra fees. This is not a new idea, when suburbs were being created in the mid 20th century "milk-floats" would provide a delivery service for milk and other goods.
Re: (Score:2)
Why should someone deliver to you for free?
Re: Punishing people as usual (Score:2)
Becoming disabled is a fact of life that will affect us all. Having systems in place that allow disabled people to access the things they need at no additional out-of-pocket costs is something we would all benefit from.
Re: (Score:2)
> Why should someone deliver to you for free?
Because that increases sales, like what happened at Domino's. Of course, even Domino's delivery wasn't really free but just hidden in the nominal cost of the pizza.
Re: (Score:2)
In my experience, the delivery services increase per-item costs as well as charging a delivery fee, a service fee, a driver tip, and more. Something that's $10 on the shelf might be $12 on the site (which also increases sales tax), plus a $2.99 service fee plus a $5.99 delivery, plus a driver tip.
I have no problem with them charging itemized fees, so I can see and make my decisions, but hiding additional delivery company profit in per-item fees should be banned.
Re: Punishing people as usual (Score:2)
It's also a way to get around the prohibition on setting different prices for SNAP recipients. For example you can buy over the net from Costco with SNAP on Instacart but not directly. And the prices are higher there than on their site.
Re: (Score:2)
The big problem with this is that the user is already paying a delivery fee which would imply to many that they've settled that part and are now paying store prices. Pushing up prices on what's being bought while also charging a delivery fee is deceptive, particularly since they don't declare the mark up let alone tell the user how much extra they're paying.
DoorDash pulls the same scam. I remember a number of years ago on one of the incredibly rare moments I decided to use the app I noticed I was eligible f
Delivered groceries should be cheaper. (Score:2)
You do not get to choose the product and the product could easily be from a grocery store 100 miles away.
There is no good reason why grocery delivery in the super expensive cities - New York, Zurich, etc. should be expensive. It should be cheaper. Grocery stores on the outskirts of the city could easily set things up so that they deliver food at a steep discount to the high priced grocery stories in them becuase they could pay literally half the rent.
But Demand is so high for food and the inhabitant are
Re: (Score:2)
> But Demand is so high for food and the inhabitant are so used to paying high prices
Not "used to", "have to". The inhabitants bought into the "no car, depend on mass transit" lifestyle. Now they can't shop at the big box grocery stores, let alone drive to the one a mile farther away to take advantage of a good sale. So far, working exactly to local merchant's plans. Soon, the big box stores will close (they need to draw customers from a larger area to survive) and everyone will depend on the corner bodegas for beer and ultra-processed junk food.
Welcome to the food desert. I hope Mamdami's
Re: (Score:2)
That video reminds me of my local post office, got to love government run business!
behavioral segmentation (Score:2)
Behavioral segmentation is a long-time favorite of machine learning/data science product developers. Clustering users on behavior without using any private or protected information like race, gender, age, etc may have similar outcomes to just using private data. Instacart is another terrible Y-Combinator "disruptor" that is trying to solve one (non)problem without thinking about all the other problems it creates.
What people are forgetting (Score:2)
This doesn't just apply to delivery services, this is "information sharing" overall. How many people remember the corporation (Agri Stats) that "shared information" between various meat processors? They used that to depress input costs (pay employees / ranchers less) and maximize market output (raise prices to maximum level) for their companies.
This Even Happens for In-Store Shopping (Score:3)
CVS drug stores sell two CVS-branded ointments that fight fungus. One is for athlete's foot, and the other is for jock itch. A tube of the jock itch ointment costs $2 more than a tube of the athlete's foot ointment. A close examination of the tubes reveals that they contain the same amounts of the same strength of the same product. They both have instructions for both kinds of fungus. Other than the names and the prices, they are the same.
Re: (Score:2)
Since usually the exact formulations are trade secrets, the part that is not the active ingredient might have different proportions of components between the two products. But, they probably don't; the price is determined by the rental cost of the space the product occupies on the shelf, i.e. how many they sell.
Re: (Score:2)
> CVS drug stores sell two CVS-branded ointments that fight fungus. One is for athlete's foot, and the other is for jock itch. A tube of the jock itch ointment costs $2 more than a tube of the athlete's foot ointment. A close examination of the tubes reveals that they contain the same amounts of the same strength of the same product. They both have instructions for both kinds of fungus. Other than the names and the prices, they are the same.
There was a similar case a decade ago in Australia where the same painkiller was sold under different labels as "headache" treatment, "neck pain" treatment etc. It was all the same ingredient at the same strength, in different packets with different prices: [1]https://www.abc.net.au/news/20... [abc.net.au]
The Australian consumer watchdog was not impressed.
[1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-03-05/accc-launches-action-over-27misleading27-nurofen-products/6282124
So what (Score:1)
reset your cookies or use a private browser, most companies won't know who you are. Those who are stupid enough not to price check deserve to be gouged.
Re: (Score:2)
That no longer works. Companies use a technique called "browser profiling". They develop a unique fingerprint of your browser based, os, browser, and add ins (determining the order of add ins) plus geographic location.
Re: (Score:2)
But most don't use it to track prices, I have seen several instances where I've opened up the same page in a private tab and the price is different.
Re: (Score:2)
They simply ask you to login to add stuff to the cart. Once you login, they know you.
Law of one price? (Score:1)
If you drop rational pricing theory, why hold to old wives' tales about inflation?
If prices are noisy to at least plus-or-minus 7%, what does 3% inflstion mean? Could inflstion stats be noise, resulting from a random price at the particulsr time the survey was taken?
If inflation is noisy, why not adapt to it using indexation instead of sticking to ancient fantasies about the quantity theory of money?
Re: (Score:2)
Inflation is a bogus number, used by the govt. to fool the public. If you take the inflation series over the last 20 years and multiply it all up, it simply does not reflect the ground reality of the prices I paid for most things 20 years ago vs today. Things are way more expensive than what inflation wants us to believe.
I laughed (Score:2)
This is the most American thing I have seen this year.
Re: (Score:2)
> This is the most American thing I have seen this year.
Ironically, [1]American Quakers [wikipedia.org] are the reason for [2]stable pricing [npr.org] from sale to sale to begin with, so, I would definitely not call that the most American thing normally. But, this year, the Republican president is sponsoring national ownership of everything, so I can't really say departures from the norm in the US are odd...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quakers
[2] https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/02/28/589278258/planet-money-shorts-the-invention-of-the-price-tag
Re: (Score:1)
I think they just want to get in on that sweet Uber-style "surge pricing."
Re: (Score:2)
According to the video I watched on this very subject last night, the concept is similar to surge pricing but the implementation is very different. With surge pricing, you charge a single, much higher than normal, price to gouge customers during small windows of time. With "algorithmic" or "optimized" pricing, you can charge different prices for different groups of people and get higher prices 100% of the time.
Re: (Score:2)
I watched the video too, but they didn't actually seem to acknowledge "surge pricing"?
They explicitly said "people tried to purchase X at the same time" - and the point of the algorithm at its most basic function, is to automatically apply a supply/demand curve. There are 5x of an item on the shelf, 4 people try to buy it within a few minutes of each other, there is no such thing as "instant" on a computer, each of these transactions will serialize, and the price will go up because demand hit hard all of a
Re: (Score:2)
A lot depends on how much you believe their explanation. I don't. In fact, I suspect the person making the explanation didn't know the reason, and either invented what they thought would sound good, or just read something someone else handed them.
Corporations don't have a "central mind" that knows all the things they are doing and why they do them. To get a reasoned answer takes a long time, and usually isn't what they want to deliver anyway.
Re: (Score:2)
Surge pricing? eBay did it first!
Re: (Score:3)
It is legal to do so in the EU, BUT you must make the full process that generated that price transparent and you must state that it is a personalized price:
[1]https://europa.eu/youreurope/c... [europa.eu]
I guess that pretty much kills the idea in the EU as it relies of customers not knowing. Anyways, have fun with your anti-consumer version of capitalism! So much winning! Just not for you...
[1] https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/consumers/unfair-treatment/unfair-pricing/index_en.htm
Re: (Score:2)
Exactly what I was thinking about US capitalism.
If there is any "personalized pricing", I would tend to believe that I am always being ripped.
We need an app that aggregates prices across different users at different times and displays a [Min Max] price history for each item over a period of time, like a month or so. That way you know if you are being ripped or not.
Online things are nice ways to apply all sorts of algorithms to ultimately rip customers.