THE MORNING RANT: Instacart Allowed Pricing Based on Who You Are Rather than What You’re Buying

A subject I keep returning to is the management philosophy of financializing every aspect of a business’ operations, providing short term gain, but ultimately destroying equity and causing the erosion of customer loyalty. By treating employees as a pestilence and customers as prey, these corporate destructors provide ammunition to the enemies of free markets.

Instacart is the latest company to receive major blowback. In this case, it was for a despicable and discriminatory pricing tool it provided grocers. As documented by Consumer Reports, and then reported more broadly:

• Customers using Instacart to purchase groceries through major grocery chains (including Albertson’s, Target, Costco, Kroger, Safeway and others) were subject to “algorithmic pricing.”

• The same grocery item bought from the same store at the same time would have a different price depending on who the customer was, and how the algorithm gauged the customer’s price sensitivity.

• An experiment by Consumer Reports had online shoppers order identical baskets of groceries at the same time from the same store. The price of that basket of groceries varied from $114.34 to $123.93

This is significantly different from offering discounts to those enrolled in loyalty programs, or getting discounts for buying a bundle of products or in bulk. In those situations, all customers have access to the same pricing.

When other media outlets started covering this story, and it gained traction on social media, Instacart stopped allowing retailers to engage in this form of price discrimination, “Instacart Ends AI-Driven Pricing Tests That Pushed up Costs for Some Shoppers” [CNBC – 12/22/2025]

In a tweet, my Tennessee state representative, Michele Reneau, succinctly summed up just how offensive this Instacart initiative was, ”If the price depends on who you are instead of what you’re buying, that’s not capitalism.”

We are in a political battle against the siren song of socialism. It is imperative, therefore, that those in executive positions in corporate America stop engaging in amoral practices to mine the last possible dollar of revenue from customers. Doing so provides ammunition to the enemies of economic freedom.

[buck.throckmorton at protonmail dot com]

posted by Buck Throckmorton at 11:00 AM

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