From KCRW, I'm Evan Kleinman, and this is good food.

Is your grocery bill astronomical?

I know mine is.

I can remember when a paper bag of groceries was $20.

Now it's about $70.

Yes, inflation is partly to blame, but if you have a hunch that something more insidious

is happening behind the scenes, you may be right. During the lead up to COVID, everyone was

building these kind of advanced systems to really kind of manipulate prices, but everyone was

afraid to do things with them. There really was this fear

that if you raise the price by a few pennies, people would flock to your competitors. But then COVID

happened, and we saw real inflation, real supply shocks come to the industry. And it taught people,

you know, not only can they raise prices, they can raise prices a lot more without really much

consequence.

Before he became a journalist, Eric Gardner worked in the grocery pricing industry.

So when he discovered that Instacart was charging different prices for the same product across

the platform, he took notice. The official term is dynamic pricing. In reality, it means that you might

have been charged more for the exact same groceries than your neighbor without ever knowing it.

A joint team from Consumer Reports, Groundwork Collective, and More Perfect union work together to investigate with Eric Gardner

taking a lead role. Hi, Eric. Hi there. Nice to be here. Good to meet you. And thank you for this work.

As a person who uses Instacart more frequently than I should, I feel personally attacked.

I think that's been kind of the general feedback that we've gotten from folks. How did you get involved in this story?

So this story was about a year in the making. A while back, I did a similar test around Uber

...