It's the Brian Lairn Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. So now we turn to a conversation

about groceries. We all need them. We all buy them. And these days, a lot of people

buy them online, right? Regardless of where you shop, you probably felt some sticker shock recently,

that moment when you realized like, wait, how was the tub of yogurt, almost double the price it was a few

years ago. But according to a new investigation from consumer reports

and the non-profits, groundwork, collaborative, and more perfect union, the grocery delivery company

Instacart may have been making the problem at least a little bit worse. They found that the company

has been running AI-driven pricing experiments on their customers.

That is, they've been charging people different amounts for the same product from the very same store.

Now, we've actually got some pretty big breaking news that came out yesterday.

I see that as a result of their investigation, Instacart announced that they would

stop charging different prices for the same groceries at the same time.

With us now to unpack this news and tell us about the investigation that they undertook is

Derek Kravitz, reporter and deputy editor at Consumer Reports.

Derek, thanks for joining us. Welcome to WNYC.

Yeah, thanks for having me. So what kinds of

experiments were they conducting exactly? So we enlisted 400 volunteers from across the country to

test, do our own testing to find out which prices they were being charged for a variety of

different goods on the Instacart app for Target,

Costco, Kroger, Albertson Safeway, some of the big retailers in the United States.

And we looked at a lot of different products, 12 pack of eggs, Skippy peanut butter,

Cheerios, all, you know, some major name brands.

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