Supermarket Surprise: Are You Paying More Than You Should?

Grocery prices are high enough these days, but this morning, Consumer Report says supermarkets across the country are overcharging customers for some products marked as being on sale. In about half of the stores we looked at, there were significant price tag errors. Their investigation found widespread price label errors at 26 Kroger owned grocery stores in more than a dozen states. We found that most of the expired price tags led to overcharges um at checkout. Uh the average overcharge was $1.70 per item, which basically rounds up to about 18% per item, which is significant. They looked into everything from beef, salmon, coffee, juice, vegetables, even cough medicine, and dog food. One major factor in these pricing errors, too many labels to keep up with. Some stores have as many as 15,000 discount tags displayed at one time. Sometimes a lot of these folks are only working 20, 25 hours a week. This is a heavy, laborintensive job. In response, Kroger said it's committed to affordable and accurate pricing and regularly conducts price checks that review millions of items weekly to ensure our shelf prices are accurate. Kroger isn't alone. In 2022, a shopper sued Walmart for alleged overcharging. And this past October, Safeway, Albertson's, and Vans paid nearly $4 million to settle a lawsuit claiming they were overcharging customers more than the lowest advertised price. Rihanna, ABC News, New York.