Derek and Allison Hadfield experienced something infuriating when they shopped at their local Kroger grocery in Belpre, Ohio, a town of about 6,600 across the Ohio River from West Virginia. Via The Guardian:
When they tried to save money by buying items on sale, they said, many of the discounts vanished when Kroger rang up their carts at checkout. Personal pizzas posted as on sale for $1 a piece rang up for $1.25 each. An 8oz jar of minced garlic listed at the low price of $2.49 cost $3.99 at checkout – a 60% jump.
“Almost every single time I go in the store, the listed price of an item is NOT what rings up at the register,” Allison Hadfield, who home-schools the couple’s two children, wrote in December in a complaint to Ohio’s attorney general. “I want Kroger to stop screwing over people especially when they are the only store in town!”
The family’s experiences are not an isolated problem involving a single store, an investigation of the supermarket giant’s pricing practices by the Guardian US, Consumer Reports and the Food & Environment Reporting Network has found.
Kroger stores in multiple states, the investigation has revealed, show a pattern of overcharging customers by frequently listing expired sale prices on the shelves and then ringing up the regular prices at checkout – a practice that adds additional burdens on to American families already struggling under the weight of the soaring costs for eggs, meat and other groceries.
Talk about "gotcha!"
At times, Kroger’s sale tags don’t clearly disclose that a discount offer has ended. In some instances expiration dates are listed in small print and in others they are noted in a corporate code that is not clear to people who are not Kroger employees. Some customers catch the problem at checkout or when they go over their receipts, but workers and union officials said many busy shoppers don’t notice the overcharges.
“It really makes me feel bad because some of them are on fixed incomes and they’re older. They’re not going to pay attention,” said Joy Alexander, who works as a scan coordinator at a Kroger-owned King Soopers store in suburban Denver. “They think that when they took it off the shelf, it was $2.50. They don’t know that they’re paying $3.75 for that one item.”
Kroger, the nation’s second largest grocery retailer behind Walmart, is headquartered in Cincinnati and operates more than 2,700 stores in 35 states under a variety of names, including King Soopers, Harris Teeter, Ralphs, Fry’s Food and Drug, and others.
In a statement, Kroger said the price tag errors identified by the news organizations represented “a few dozen examples across several years out of billions of customer transactions annually”.
You may remember that Kamala Harris promised to give the FTC the power to impose the first-ever federal ban on price-gouging on food and groceries. Oh well! In March, Trump fired two Democratic FTC commissioners known as aggressive advocates for consumer protection.
And in case you think people are picking on poor Kroger, go read the entire article. So much to chew on!
