Kroger Stores Overcharging Shoppers on Sale Items, CR Price Check Finds
Consumers say Kroger has a price tag problem, resulting in overcharges for many grocery items. We sent shoppers to stores to check.
Update, May 29, 2025: A day after Consumer Reports and other news organizations published an investigation into a yearslong pattern of price tag errors on sale and discounted products in Kroger-owned grocery stores, Kroger announced it would be hiring an additional 15,000 employees across the country to "enhance the customer experience." Several Kroger employees told Consumer Reports that, following the investigation’s publication on May 14, 2025, managers have directed them to systematically correct all erroneous price tags on store shelves in a matter of days, including at a Kroger store in Ohio where the company is headquartered. But Kroger, in a statement to CR, disputed those claims, saying it hasn’t issued any such orders.
Shoppers at Kroger, one of the nation’s largest grocery chains, have been unknowingly paying full price at checkout for scores of items—from meat and vegetables to juice, rice, and alcohol—that have been advertised as discounted or on sale, a monthslong investigation by Consumer Reports and other news organizations found.
CR, along with The Guardian and the Food & Environment Reporting Network (FERN), began checking grocery prices after learning that Kroger workers in Colorado who are currently in labor union negotiations with the company were alleging widespread errors on price labels—a problem they say has been going on for years and that Kroger is well aware of. The chain has also been called out by state inspectors for high rates of price tag errors and has defended itself against multiple class-action lawsuits alleging pricing errors, filed by Kroger customers in California, Illinois, Ohio, and Utah.
To document the size and breadth of the problem, we recruited people to shop at 26 Kroger and Kroger-owned stores, including Harris Teeter, Fred Meyer, Fry’s, and Ralphs, in 14 states and the District of Columbia in March, April, and May.
The shoppers found expired sales labels that led to overcharges on more than 150 grocery items, including Cheerios cereal, Mucinex cold and flu medication, Nescafé instant coffee, boneless beef, salmon, and dog food. One-third of the expired sales tags were out of date by at least 10 days, and the prices of five of the products were expired by at least 90 days. The average overcharge we found was $1.70 per item, or 18.4 percent. Our findings suggest the typical Kroger shopper ends up paying far more for what they think are discounted items—all during a time of inflation and economic uncertainty.
“People should pay the price that is being advertised, that’s the law,” says Edgar Dworsky, a consumer advocate and the founder of Consumer World, who crafted the first grocery pricing protection law in Massachusetts nearly 40 years ago. “The issue here is that shoppers can’t rely on the shelf price being accurate, and that’s a big problem.”
According to complaints we reviewed and shoppers we spoke to, Kroger employees work quickly to correct pricing errors when they are pointed out. But for many other grocery shoppers, those pricing errors undoubtedly go unnoticed.
Lawyers and experts who looked at our findings say Kroger’s price tag errors could violate both federal and state consumer protection laws. “The scale of the price errors identified at Kroger, and the length of time that these issues have persisted, are deeply concerning,” says Nina DiSalvo, policy director of the nonprofit legal organization Towards Justice.
In response to our findings and detailed questions, a Kroger company representative said in a statement that it is “committed to affordable and accurate pricing” and that it regularly conducts price checks that review “millions of items weekly to ensure our shelf prices are accurate.” Kroger said the sales price tag errors we cited were but a “few dozen examples across several years out of billions of customer transactions annually.”
“While any error is unacceptable, the characterization of widespread pricing concerns is patently false,” the company said.

$1.99 each or 6 for $11.94
SHOWN SALES PRICE
$1.67 each or 6 for $10
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$4.99
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$2.49
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$3.49
SHOWN SALES PRICE
$2.49
April 8, 2025
Not Shown

$4.99
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$2.99
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Graphic: Consumer Reports Graphic: Consumer Reports
A Kroger Store in Ohio Still Has Price Errors, Despite Company Pledge to Fix
Some Kroger customers do more than seek price adjustments when they find a mistake. Allison and Derek Hadfield of Belpre, Ohio, say they spend between $400 and $500 on groceries each month for themselves and their two children at their local Kroger store. They filed three separate complaints at the end of 2024 and beginning of 2025 with the Ohio attorney general’s office about the store, saying they have repeatedly caught it ringing up prices that are higher than the sales prices hanging on shelves.
“Almost every single time I go in the store, the listed price of an item is NOT what rings up at the register,” Allison Hadfield wrote in their complaint. As one example, she said she bought an 8-ounce jar of minced garlic listed as $2.49 on the shelf. At the register, the price came up as $3.99—an overcharge of $1.50.
The couple said Kroger employees told them the store didn’t have the staff to keep the shelf tags up to date. Two other shoppers filed similar complaints in 2024 with the attorney general’s office about the Belpre store. “Literally every person I know that shops at Belpre, OH, Kroger has this issue,” one wrote. In fact, the Kroger store in Belpre has seen significant cuts to both staffing and hours, federal data shows. Between 2019 and 2024, the average number of workers there fell by 16.3 percent, or 24 employees, and the average number of hours they work each week fell by 7.4 percent, or a little more than 2 hours each week, according to data from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.
The Hadfields didn’t end up speaking with Kroger representatives themselves, but the Ohio attorney general’s office sent the couple a response from Kroger. That email said a Kroger executive would share the Hadfields’ price tag complaints with the local store manager "to ensure that our employees are following proper procedure when removing and updating sale tags."
In May, we checked the Kroger store in Belpre, Ohio, to see whether it had fixed its out-of-date price tag problem. In a single shopping trip three months after Kroger told the Hadfields it would address the issue, we found expired sale tags on 11 items. Purchasing six of them—batteries, chocolate, potstickers, pasta, Kroger-brand raisin bran cereal, and Kroger-brand brown rice—resulted in a little more than $5 in overcharges.
Kroger’s Post-Pandemic Staffing Cuts Amid Surge in Profits
Kroger employees say there’s a simple reason for the pricing errors: After years of cuts to staff and hours, there are simply not enough employees to manually switch out price labels on shelves because some stores have tens of thousands of price tags hanging at any one time.
“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,” says Joy Alexander, a Kroger employee who has worked at a King Soopers store, a Kroger subsidiary, in suburban Denver for 18 years. “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.”
When the job of updating sales tags doesn’t get done, consumers are “kinda left in the dark,” Alexander says. “You don’t know what you’re paying for.”
Colorado employees and union officials say the overcharges have sparked growing anger among customers, with some taking out their frustrations on cashiers and other front-of-the-store employees. They say store-level management tells front-end workers to fix price errors for individual shoppers who complain but doesn’t do what needs to be done to correct the expired discount tags that are driving the problem.
“They go: ‘Just take care of the customer, deal with it, and we’ll fix it later on.’ And that never happens,” says Chris Lacey, a King Soopers service manager in Colorado.
Since the pandemic, Kroger has reported record-breaking grocery sales and profits, including a $3.85 billion operating profit last fiscal year. Since 2019, Kroger’s stock has outperformed and returned more money to shareholders than both the S&P 500 index on Wall Street and a peer group of food and drug companies that includes Albertsons, Costco, CVS, Target, Walgreens, and Walmart. And in December, after its merger with Albertsons failed, Kroger announced it would buy back $7.5 billion worth of its own company stock, one of the largest corporate buybacks in 2024. That is a sign, analysts say, that Kroger is especially confident in its own business and ability to deliver consistent shareholder returns of between 8 percent and 11 percent in the future.
But to achieve all of that financial success, most Kroger stores have been doing more with less.
Since 2019, even though the number of Kroger-owned stores—more than 2,700—has largely remained the same, Kroger has significantly cut the number of workers in most of its stores and the number of hours those full- and part-time employees work each week, data from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration shows. In the Kroger-owned stores where we found significant price tag errors, between 2019 and 2024 the average number of employees has been reduced by 10.3 percent, or 17 employees per store, and the average number of hours they work each week has fallen by 9.9 percent, or 2.7 hours per week.
In the stores where we found fewer or no price tag errors, the staffing cuts and reduction in working hours has been noticeably less. The average number of employees in each of those stores has fallen by 6.2 percent, or about 9.5 people per store, and their average hours were cut by 9.3 percent, or 2.4 hours less each week.
A Kroger company representative disputed that labor hours have been reduced. The company also said in a statement that they “intentionally staff our stores to keep them running smoothly while creating an enjoyable place to shop. Our staffing decisions are data-driven to balance workload and schedules.”
Internal Documents Show Kroger Executives Have Long Known About Price Tag Errors
Kroger is not the only grocer to face allegations of unfair and deceptive pricing practices in recent years. In 2022, a shopper in Niles, Ill., sued Walmart after alleging it was overcharging between 10 percent and 15 percent for six items, a trend he alleged was discovered in five other states. That case was originally dismissed but was revived by a three-judge appeals court and is awaiting trial. In October, the grocers Safeway, Albertsons, and Vons agreed to pay a nearly $4 million civil penalty to settle allegations that they unlawfully charged customers prices higher than their lowest advertised or posted price. That case was brought by district attorneys in seven California counties where the companies operate hundreds of stores. North Carolina is aggressive about policing grocery store pricing and has levied hefty fines against Dollar General and Family Dollar after multiple failed inspections.
But Kroger stands out not just because of its market dominance in parts of the Midwest and the South, where it is often one of the few operating grocery stores to choose from, but also because Kroger executives have repeatedly been made aware of pricing problems in its stores, according to inspection and complaint records obtained by CR through state open-records laws. For example, in Colorado, where there are King Soopers stores in 36 cities, the chain has twice failed price check tests performed by state regulators since January 2025. In Ohio, where Kroger is headquartered and has a significant market share, the attorney general’s office has received nearly 60 complaints about price tag and overcharge issues at Kroger since 2021. In Michigan, where Kroger is dominant in metro Detroit, the attorney general’s office has received 229 consumer complaints about Kroger since 2020. In 25 of those cases, the attorney general’s office has found violations of Michigan state law concerning price errors, overcharging, and bait and switch tactics, and returned nearly $1,600 to Kroger customers.
Indeed, a senior Kroger executive questioned “why are tags not being done,” in a meeting with Colorado union representatives in January, according to minutes of that meeting. “If we are not getting the job done, that is a different problem for us,” the Kroger executive said.
Kroger has tested technology that could help fix the price tag problem: Digital tags have been piloted in select stores but have yet to be rolled out nationwide. In one promotional video for the digital tags, Kroger claims that they would ensure “BETTER ACCURACY” [emphasis theirs] for customers. In addition, the company has taken other behind-the-scenes measures to deal with incorrect price tags, according to internal company documents obtained by CR and the other news organizations.
Kroger’s "Make It Right" policy allows employees to fix price discrepancies on the spot, on a case-by-case basis. A Kroger company flyer, updated in 2023, refers to such discrepancies as one of the "most common reasons we change prices for customers" and even has a special internal code to be used when prices are corrected in its computer system: "MAKE IT RIGHT."
Kroger also conducts its own in-store price tag audits to ensure the tags are accurate. But those audits can reveal significant issues: In one internal document about an audit obtained by CR and the news organizations for a Kroger-owned store, a random sample of hundreds of products found that nearly 6 percent of them had incorrect price tags that would have led to overcharges at checkout. The Kroger company policy allows for no more than 1 percent of all price tags to be incorrect, according to the document.
In a statement, Kroger said its “Make It Right” policy “addresses any situation when we unintentionally fall short of a customer’s expectations.”
Every Region of the Country Affected by Kroger Price Errors
Consumer Reports and the other news organizations found that pricing errors were not a problem at all Kroger stores. In almost half of our sample, the price tags were mostly up to date and correct, having been updated by hand by Kroger store employees, who say they are typically tasked with switching out and replacing savings and promotional tags on shelves on Wednesdays.
But at the other half of the stores, we found dozens of pricing errors.
Other than staffing shortages and human error, there was no visible reason why these Kroger stores had more pricing errors than others; the stores are in different regions of the U.S.—Arizona, Michigan, Oregon, Virginia, Washington state, and West Virginia. CR’s shoppers looked at samples of regularly priced and discount labels and took samples on different days of the week, at different times of day, scoured different areas of the stores and aisles, looked at both name-brand and lower-cost Kroger “private label” items, and went on repeat visits.
The only discernible pattern was that some stores we checked had erroneous price labels clustered in specific aisles or in particular product categories, suggesting that employees largely missed those areas when updating labels.
With food prices increasing nearly 24 percent since 2020, Americans are spending a greater portion of their income on food than they have in decades. The Federal Trade Commission, which regulates grocery stores and has the authority to stop unfair sales and advertising practices, helped stop Kroger’s attempted merger last year with a supermarket rival, Albertsons, in a deal the FTC said would have led to higher prices and fewer choices for consumers.
Grocery prices can weigh on American consumers, and even small discrepancies can negatively factor into household budgets. This March, a shopper in Arlington, Texas, contacted the FTC to report that the local Kroger has been leaving out-of-date sales tags up throughout the store, resulting in overcharges, for five years.
The shopper, who estimated they had been overcharged by about $6 every week, said they had taken steps to stop the practice: They talked to store employees, Kroger’s corporate office, and the Better Business Bureau, which told the shopper about class-action lawsuits against the company. But the customer has "not received a satisfactory response," the FTC reported, despite firmly believing that “the store may be cheating customers out of a significant amount of money.”
Consumer Reports, The Guardian, and the Food & Environment Reporting Network would like to acknowledge the assistance of the shoppers who participated in this project. They include: Haley Parsley, Cait Kelley, Jules Feeney, Betti Johnson, Blandon Ray, Quincy Kelly, Katherine Smithyman, Hope Covey, Callie Lyons, Courtney Comfort, Harry Chandler, Nan Rothwell, Carter Smith, Madeline Nguyen, Brent Cunningham, Steph Quinn, Julian Mendoza, Ethan Bakuli, Sandy West, Juwan Holmes, and Lee Roop.
Editor’s Note: Our work on privacy, security, AI, price transparency, and financial technology issues is made possible by the vision and support of the Ford Foundation, Omidyar Network, Craig Newmark Philanthropies, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.