We Had 400 People Shop For Groceries. What We Found Will Shock You.
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN commenters cite it as a concrete, investigated example of algorithmic personalized pricing in grocery delivery when discussing surveillance pricing and corporate use of consumer data.
Recommended by 1 people across 1 different months, 2025 to 2026.
What it is
More Perfect Union, working with Consumer Reports and Groundwork Collaborative, had about 400 people shop for the same groceries on Instacart and found different shoppers were shown different prices for identical items, including at physical stores. The investigation estimates this could cost families around $1,200 a year and attributes it to AI pricing algorithms.
What people said
Recommends CircuitSeuss · 2026-08 · Hacker News · on “How credit card rewards became a $9.2B wealth transfer”
FTC study, Jan 2025 [LINK] Frequently sited investigative video journalism on grocery delivery prices (and more): [this video] Airlines: [LINK] Insurance: [LINK] Frankly, it’s everywhere— if a company is large enough, they will leverage consumer data to increase profits as much as the consumer will bear. There are many other examples, but I’ll just link you this as a jumping off point if you want to go further: [LINK] Ongoing US house oversight committee investigation [LINK] [LINK] See also: [LINK] [LINK]
Cites TSiege · 2025-12 · Hacker News · on “AI Isn't Just Spying on You. It's Tricking You into Spending More”
More perfect and consumer reports did a joint investigation and have uncovered this already happening. [this video]
Cites anon7000 · 2026-01 · Hacker News · on “I'm a developer for a major food delivery app”
I mean, it’s not even remotely hard to believe. There are plenty of extremely similar examples, such as: - grocery delivery algorithmic price fixing: [this video] - dollar general lying about prices: [LINK] But yeah, it’d be good to get this backed up even better. Delivery companies are already on thin ice