BOTHELL, Wash. — Grocery prices have soared by nearly 30% over the past five years, and a nationwide investigation suggests shoppers buying items on sale may have been paying even more than they realize — because of expired sale tags.
A KIRO 7 investigation last November on grocery price accuracy on the local level found what Consumer Reports revealed at a national level.
Some prices displayed on store shelves don’t always match what customers are charged at checkout. The problem, first uncovered locally by KIRO 7 last year, involved a Seattle-area grocery store manager who told KIRO 7 that pricing errors at her store occurred because staffing shortages made it difficult to keep thousands of constantly changing shelf tags up to date.
Consumer Reports expanded a similar grocery pricing investigation nationwide.
Over three months, Consumer Reports sent secret shoppers to 26 Kroger-owned grocery stores across 14 states, including a Fred Meyer in Bothell. Their findings, during multiple visits, revealed expired or inaccurate sale tags on more than 150 items, ranging from dog food to coffee, to cashews and cough medicine.
“The staffing issues came up repeatedly as the chief culprit for pricing errors,” said Derek Kravitz, deputy editor at Consumer Reports, who led the investigation.
Among the shoppers recruited by Consumer Reports was Betti Johnson, a longtime Bothell Fred Meyer customer.
“I walked the aisles and looked for expired sales tags and documented what I found,” Johnson said. “If I found a section that had been missed, pretty much every sales tag was expired.”
Johnson said expired tags often led to overcharges at checkout.
According to Consumer Reports, during one shopping trip, she was overcharged for 11 items. Across all the stores Consumer Reports surveyed, the average overcharge was 18.4%, or about $1.70 per item.
Under Washington state law, customers are entitled to the price marked on the sales tag, even if it has expired. Johnson believed the primary issue stemmed from the way the store had been staffed. “They’re so short-staffed that the people who go in to do the pricing changes can’t complete their job,” Johnson said.
Noted Improvements
Following the Consumer Reports investigation, Johnson said on several return visits to different Fred Meyer stores, she noticed improvements. She said she couldn’t find a single expired sales tag. “It was perfect last week,” she said. “And over the weekend, I went to the Mill Creek–Silver Lake (location). It was perfect,” she said.
KIRO 7 returned to the Bothell Fred Meyer store and found zero expired tags in any of the items Betti Johnson had noted earlier. Checking every aisle, KIRO 7 investigators found that all sales tags appeared to be 100% accurate.
Random visits in the same week to Fred Meyer locations in Bellevue and Issaquah also showed the same thing.
KIRO 7 shoppers noted that more store workers appeared to be visible throughout the stores, checking prices manually.
Kroger has not responded to KIRO 7’s request for comment, but the union representing Fred Meyer workers noted the Consumer Reports investigation made a difference in staffing.
“We know that improved staffing leads to better stores and a better customer experience,” said a statement from UFCW Local 3000 President Faye Guenther. “In response to the investigation, store workers told the union that Kroger added staff and pulled workers from other departments to prioritize checking the accuracy of sales price tags.”
The union noted a recently ratified contract with Kroger authorized “staffing language” to fill more shifts in the stores, and new options for workers to pick up extra hours.
Tad O’Neill, assistant Attorney General in Washington’s Consumer Protection Division, said retailers who don’t charge posted prices are violating state law, even if the error is unintentional.
“There are a lot of pricing errors that are happening,” O’Neill said, noting Consumer Protection’s informal complaint resolution service, which works to resolve complaints when customers are overcharged. “It’s a very successful program here, and we’re very proud of the results,” O’Neill said.
O’Neill’s office accepts consumer complaints through email, scanned documents, or in-person visits at its downtown Seattle location.
“We tell (store managers) that we’re here to conduct a price scanning inspection. And that’s an inspection to make sure that the price on the shelf matches what the customer’s charged at checkout,” said John Megow, who manages a crew of Consumer Protection Inspectors for the city of Seattle’s Regulatory Compliance and Consumer Protection Department.
Megow’s Seattle team checked price accuracy at nearly 100 grocery stores in 2024 and noticed a troubling trend.
“We’re seeing a higher fail rate, and we’re using the same inspection criteria,” he said.
Megow said inspectors used to see an average of 4% to 5% of retailers fail inspections, which means more than 2% of what they scan are over-charges.
This year, that failure rate jumped to 12%.
Megow suggested prices are changing faster than workers can keep up with them, leading to more mistakes in posting the correct price.
“One (overcharge) that comes to mind is a bottle of alcohol that rang up $30, $20 more than the shelf price,” said Megow. He said his inspectors warned the store of the failure and announced his office would return for more unannounced inspections.
“If they fail a second one, we let them know that the third one that they could receive a citation and a fine associated with that. And it’s a $2,000 fine for the third violation,” he said.
Last year, Safeway, Albertsons and Vons agreed to pay nearly $4 million in other states to settle lawsuits alleging they charged more than advertised prices.
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