Bad Democrat

I wanted to talk about an Instacart story that got buried under the news cycle before we broke. It came from Consumer Reports–and states that a widely-used grocery delivery app called Instacart has been charging certain customers higher prices for the same items from the same grocery store. The Los Angeles Times notes that the prices were up to 13% higher for customers that Instacart chose to upcharge. The original Consumer Reports story said 23 percent. This included groceries from Albertsons, Costco, Kroger, Safeway, Sprouts Farmers Market, and Target. Instacart is a good option for people too busy to go to the grocery store, and it should remain so. And grocery stores would be remiss to not offer their stores as shopping outlets on the platform.

Instacart is charging different customers different prices for the same exact goods from the same places. I want to be clear about these different prices: instacart does not own these items. the grocery store does. they are shopping for these items from the grocery store through independent contractors that are like uber drivers, but for grocery shopping. the grocery store owns the items. But the items are priced higher at certain customers and certain times on the Instacart database, so they appear to cost more even though they don’t at the store. Nothing–I repeat nothing–from the Instacart response to these findings clears that up. The LA Times reports that Instacart was using AI to price the items. One, I wouldn’t be so sure that the traditional grocery store is using AI to price its items so much as gain insights into how items are priced. That’s different than deploying it on prices. And two is one: Instacart is running experiments on grocery customers and we don’t know who.