NPR. This is the indicator from Planet Money. I'm Waylon Wong. And I'm Stephen

Missaha. And Waylon, I have a confession. I love grocery shopping. Me too. It's like my weekend activity.

I mean, it's so fun. I mean, it's a place where you could like buy crispy chili flakes and like a light bulb.

There's like aisle after aisle fresh fruit and I love a bakery section.

Yes. And every purchase of, you know, a croissant or a box of ice cream bars provides the

store with data, data that's used to figure out how much to stock and how much to charge.

Most of this data gathering is pretty passive.

You know, you weigh your lettuce, scan your card, and bam, new data.

But recently, some grocery stores took that a step further.

They gather data by charging some customers more than others.

On today's show, how much can you really trust you're getting the same price tag as someone else?

We look at research in how grocers charge different customers, different amounts for the same items on the shopping platform Instacart.

And we ask what this could tell us about the future of the prices we all pay.

Think of Instacart like DoorDash, but for the supermarket.

It let shoppers buy groceries from the comfort of their home, either for pickup or delivery.

And like DoorDash, the prices are often set by the store, not Instacart, sometimes at a markup.

In December, there was new research released on that pricing.

It came from a few different consumer

advocacy groups, including Consumer Reports and the Groundwork Collaborative. That last group is run

by Lindsay Owens, who was a senior policy advisor for Senator Elizabeth Warren.

Okay, so I got to ask, are you an in-store shopper, delivery, or curbside?

Oh, man, I'm all three.

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