Kroger Is Overcharging Shoppers, According to a Consumer Reports Investigation

You may want to check your receipt if you've recently shopped at your local Kroger. 

In May, Consumer Reports, in partnership with The Guardian and the Food & Environment Reporting Network (FERN), released a report on the grocery giant's errors in price labeling, which caused consumers to overpay by an average of 18.4%. 

Consumer Reports became aware of the issue after learning that Kroger workers in Colorado alleged that old sale tags remained on products long after their expiration dates, leading to consumers paying a different cost at the register. The workers, Consumer Reports noted, claim the issue is well-known to the grocery chain's head office. It's also an issue Kroger has faced before in numerous class-action lawsuits in California, Illinois, Ohio, and Utah, Consumer Reports noted.

“It's an open secret,” Derek Kravitz, an investigative reporter at Consumer Reports, shared with Food & Wine. “Grocery chains, and more specifically dollar stores, have been dinged on this for years.” 

To determine the true significance of the problem, the Consumer Reports team recruited volunteers to shop at 24 Kroger or Kroger-owned stores across 14 states over a span of three months. This group of shoppers discovered expired sale labels on more than 150 grocery items, several of which had expired at least 90 days earlier. This resulted in an average overcharge of $1.70 per item, or 18.4%.

“People should pay the price that is being advertised, that’s the law,” Edgar Dworsky, a consumer advocate and the founder of Consumer World, shared with Consumer Reports. “The issue here is that shoppers can’t rely on the shelf price being accurate, and that’s a big problem.”

And while employees are working diligently to correct the tags, it seems that Kroger may be undermining their efforts, as the company has also been conducting layoffs from the top down in recent months, despite reporting record profits. According to Consumer Reports, in the stores where significant errors were found, the average number of employees was reduced by 10.3% between 2019 and 2024. However, in stores with few or no price tag errors, the staffing cuts were only 6.2%. 

“It really makes me feel bad because some of [the customers] are on fixed incomes and they’re older. They’re not going to pay attention,” Joy Alexander, a Kroger employee, told Consumer Reports. “They think that when they took it off the shelf, it was $2.50. They don’t know that they’re paying $3.75 for that one item.”

For its part, Kroger told Consumer Reports that it is “committed to affordable and accurate pricing” and also rejected the idea that the price issues were as frequent as they appeared in the report. “While any error is unacceptable, the characterization of widespread pricing concerns is patently false,” the spokesperson added. 

As for what consumers should do, Kravitz said to keep it simple and “take a photo or write down the sales price you see when putting things in a cart. And then check it against the receipt when you're at the register or right before or right after.” He warned not to do it days or weeks later, as it may be more difficult to get a refund. 

“Kroger does have a Make it Right policy with an internal code that they use for their point of sale computer system to fix those errors,” Kravitz said. “But they do it on a case-by-case basis, and that's the larger problem that we're flagging because a lot of people don't check or are just too busy.” 

And if that doesn't work, Kravitz says it's time to “complain” to your local or state attorney general. Each state, he said, “typically has a consumer protection division that handles this type of complaint,” which could help you and everyone in the neighborhood save more in the future by addressing the problem from the start. See the full report at consumerreports.org.