‘Customers are being duped’

Derek and Allison Hadfield became more and more fed up whenever they shopped for their family of four at their local Kroger grocery in Belpre, Ohio, a town of about 6,600 across the Ohio River from West Virginia.

When they tried to save money by buying stuff on sale, they said, many of the discounts vanished when Kroger rang up their carts at checkout. Personal pizzas posted as on sale for $1 a piece rang up for $1.25 each. An 8 ounce jar of minced garlic listed at a low price of $2.49 cost $3.99 at checkout – a 60% jump.

“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, who home-schools the couple’s two children, wrote in December in a complaint to Ohio’s attorney general. “I want Kroger to stop screwing over people especially when they are the only store in town!”

The family’s experiences are not an isolated problem involving a single store, an investigation of the supermarket giant’s pricing practices by the Guardian US, Consumer Reports and the Food & Environment Reporting Network has found. 

Kroger stores in multiple states, the investigation has revealed, show a pattern of overcharging customers by frequently listing expired sale prices on the shelves and then ringing up the regular prices at checkout – a practice that adds additional burdens onto American families already struggling under the weight of the soaring costs for eggs, meat and other groceries.

The investigation drew on “secret shopper” tests in more than a dozen states by the Guardian and its partners as well as a separate series of tests by union grocery workers in Colorado. The investigation also drew on internal corporate documents, court records, complaints to government authorities and interviews with customers, workers and union officials.

The shopping tests by the media partners found expired tags that resulted in overcharges in 14 of the 26 stores reviewed in Washington, DC, and 14 states, including Arizona, Michigan, Oregon, Virginia and Ohio. The tests in March, April and May identified more than 150 items with expired sale tags for which Kroger was charging more than the sale price – producing average overcharges of about $1.70 per item, an 18% markup over the discount price.

On average, the expired discount tags the tests analyzed were about two weeks out of date, suggesting that thousands of customers ended up paying more for what they likely thought were discounted items.

At times, Kroger’s sale tags don’t clearly disclose that a discount offer has ended. In some instances expiration dates are listed in small print and in others they are noted in a corporate code that isn’t clear to people who aren’t Kroger employees. Some customers catch the problem at checkout or when they go over their receipts, but workers and union officials said many busy shoppers don’t notice the overcharges. 

“It really makes me feel bad because some of them are on fixed incomes and they’re older. They’re not going to pay attention,” said Joy Alexander, who works as a scan coordinator at a Kroger-owned King Soopers store in suburban Denver. “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.”

Kroger, the nation’s second largest grocery retailer behind Walmart, is headquartered in Cincinnati and operates more than 2,700 stores in 35 states under a variety of names, including King Soopers, Harris Teeter, Ralphs, Fry’s Food and Drug and others.

In a statement, Kroger said the sale price tag errors identified by the news organizations represented “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 statement said. 

The company did not provide detailed answers to most of the media partners’ questions about its pricing practices. The statement said the company 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.” 

With food costs soaring from the grocery aisle to the drive-thru window, Americans are spending a greater portion of their income to eat than they have in decades. US food prices climbed nearly 24% from 2020 to 2024, leaving many Americans feeling angry, anxious or dejected about their trips to the supermarket.

Andrew Knall, a high school math teacher in suburban Dayton, Ohio, said he feels like he is “going into battle” whenever he shops at his local Kroger, because he regularly gets hit with overcharges. “Like I’m on 24-hour missile watch here and I’m going to get ripped off at any moment.”

The Federal Trade Commission, or FTC, has responsibility for overseeing the grocery industry, with the authority to take action to stop unfair sales and advertising practices and block industry mergers likely to increase food prices. An FTC legal challenge last year helped stop Kroger’s push to absorb a supermarket rival, Albertsons, in a deal the FTC said would have led to higher prices and fewer choices for consumers.

In August, vice-president and Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris promised to give the FTC the power to impose the first-ever federal ban on price-gouging on food and groceries. Her campaign rival, Donald Trump, also promised to force food prices down. But in December, as president elect, Trump said it would be “very hard” to bring down grocery prices, and in March, as president, he fired two Democratic FTC commissioners known as aggressive advocates for consumer protection.

During the Kroger-Albertsons merger battle, legal filings revealed that a top Kroger pricing guru wrote fellow executives in early 2024 that the chain had raised its prices for milk and eggs at a level that was “significantly higher” than the rise in costs charged by its suppliers. Kroger said the email did not reflect the company’s “decades-long business model to lower prices for customers by reducing its margins.”

A complaint in October to Ohio’s attorney general from a Kroger customer from suburban Cincinnati described how overcharges on specific items at the cash register have piled on costs on top of the “outrageous prices” produced by the general inflation in food costs. 

“We just spent $121 for two seniors for a week’s groceries,” the customer wrote, noting that the bill included an $8.07 overcharge on a frozen turkey. “We shop there regularly and 3 out of five times we have to correct them on prices.”

Kroger said its business model is “rooted in bringing down prices to attract more customers to our stores.”

‘Nothing changes’

In Colorado, leaders of the United Food & Commercial Workers Union (UFCW) Local 7 say that Kroger is fully aware that inaccurate pricing is common at its King Soopers stores in the state. Workers and union officials say the company’s chronic understaffing is driving the problem. 

Union officials say that some Kroger stores have tens of thousands of sale tags hanging at any one time and – without enough workers to remove expired tags – inaccurate tags stay on the shelves for days and weeks. 

When the job of updating sale tags doesn’t get done, consumers are “kinda left in the dark,” said Alexander, the Kroger employee in Colorado. “You don’t know what you’re paying for.”

In its statement, Kroger said it is “inaccurate to say the company reduced standards or labor hours.”

“We intentionally staff our stores to keep them running smoothly while creating an enjoyable place to shop,” the statement said. “Our staffing decisions are data-driven to balance workload and schedules.”

Kroger’s workforce fell from roughly 465,000 full- and part-time employees in January 2021 to just over 409,000 in February 2025, according to company filings with US securities regulators. 

Workers and union leaders in Colorado say the overcharges have sparked growing anger among customers, with some taking out their frustrations out on cashiers and other front-of-the-store workers.   

“I’ve witnessed verbal altercations almost turn into fistfights,” said Chris Lacey, a King Soopers service manager in Colorado. “Customers are so frustrated and so at their wit’s end with the pricing that they’re just willing to take it out on anybody with a King Soopers name badge on.”

In contract talks with Kroger, UFCW Local 7 has made the overcharging issue a key negotiating point, urging the company to create a “tag integrity department” within each store and schedule more hours for employees to pull down out-of-date price labels.

Local 7 leaders outlined their concerns about overcharges in a meeting with company officials in January. A transcript shows an executive with the Kroger’s Colorado division questioned the efficiency of store employees, but acknowledged pricing errors and the impact on customers. “If we are not getting the job done, that is a different problem for us,” she said. 

Union leaders in Colorado said Kroger has done little to address the problem since that meeting.

“With these price tags, we’ve told them and they haven’t even flinched,” said Kim Cordova, Local 7’s president and international vice president for UFCW.

In March, Local 7 members conducted secret shopping tests at more than 30 King Soopers stores around Colorado. The results, which the union shared with the media partners, showed more than 300 expired discount tags led to an average overcharge of almost $1, or nearly 15%.

Kroger’s national “Make It Right” policy allows employees to fix price discrepancies on the spot, on a case-by-case basis, which the company says allows workers to address “any situation when we unintentionally fall short of a customer’s expectations.” Colorado employees and union officials 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,” Lacey, the King Soopers service manager, said.

In complaints to Ohio’s attorney general, some shoppers described getting a runaround from the company when they raised concerns with Kroger representatives at the local stores and beyond.

“I have complained to the corporate office many times but nothing changes,” a customer from Columbus said in December. A customer from Dayton said in October that he had spotted overcharges three weeks in a row but a complaint to Kroger’s corporate office “resulted in a canned response that offered no solution.”

In Belpre, Ohio, the Hadfields told the Guardian that Kroger employees confirmed to them that the store was too poorly staffed to make sure that sale tags are up to date. Kroger reduced staff at the Belpre store by 16% between 2019 and 2024, and reduced the average hours of those who remained, federal labor data shows. Derek, a US Army veteran who served as an armored crew member in Iraq, said one worker told him “they have one person responsible for changing all the prices in the store and that’s why the prices constantly ring up different.” 

The Hadfields were so frustrated that they filed three complaints with Ohio’s attorney general – one by Derek in November and two by Allison in late December and early January. Allison said in her first complaint that “we can’t even get anything resolved at the store because they are so understaffed it should be considered abuse towards their current employees.”

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 of them wrote.

The attorney general’s office forwarded Allison Hadfield’s complaints to Kroger. In response, a Kroger executive promised that company officials would share her complaints with its local store director to “ensure our employees are following proper procedure when removing and updating sale tags.”

On 1 May, the Guardian sent a reporter to the Belpre Kroger to see whether things had changed at the store. The shopping test done by the reporter found that – more than three months after Kroger promised state officials it would make sure proper procedures were being followed at the store – expired sale tags and overcharges were still a problem.  

Six of the 11 expired on-sale items the reporter purchased resulted in an overcharge at checkout. The average overcharge on those six items was more than 12.5%.

Across Ohio

On the banks of Lake Erie more than 200 miles north of Belpre, Ohio, another Kroger customer was wrestling with the same problems around the same time as the Hadfields. 

Jim Howell was overcharged on four straight visits, he said, at his local Kroger in Sandusky, Ohio, including on the purchase of six containers of vegan cream cheese. 

Howell trained as a chef and pays close attention to food prices. He said he got into the habit of doing what he called a “forensic accounting” when he got home after each trip to the store, checking what he had paid against Kroger’s listed prices on the chain’s online app, which reflects what customers will be charged at checkout. He would tally up the errors, go back to the store with his receipts, and get his money back. 

“These days, when I shop,” he said, “I just walk to the customer desk and they ask for my receipts. They know.”

But he thought that simply getting refunds was not enough. In November he went on a Facebook group, “What’s going on in Sandusky,” to complain about Kroger’s pricing practices.

“Kroger is a behemoth, one of America’s largest grocery retailers,” he wrote. “You should be able to trust them on their pricing, not have to waste time auditing and getting issues corrected.” 

The post got dozens of likes and replies, with many posters saying they had had similar problems at the Sandusky Kroger or other Kroger locations in the region. “There are *always* outdated coupons and sale prices on the shelf,” one poster said. “Has happened to me dozens of times,” another said.

Shoppers from many other towns and cities across Ohio – where industry analysts say Kroger holds a dominant position in the grocery market – are also complaining. The media partners’ review of records from the state attorney general’s office identified more than 55 complaints since 2021 from Ohioans accusing Kroger of promising one price and then charging a higher price at checkout.

More than half of these complaints – 30 – were filed in 2024 and the first three months of 2025.

Some of the complaints cited problems with a single item. But others described repeated pricing issues playing out over many visits that continued, in some instances, for a year or more.

“Every week customers are being duped into thinking some grocery items are on sale,” a shopper from Cincinnati told state officials in February. “The store is full of expired shelf tags showing one price and upon checkout [customers] are being charged a higher price.”

Andrew Knall, the Ohio schoolteacher, and his spouse, Michelle Tomashot, said they have been grappling with overcharges at Kroger for years.

In 2022, Andrew Knall wrote the state attorney general’s office to report that their family of three had been seeing overcharges “for well over a year now. My wife and I constantly complain to the clerks and the managers there but it keeps happening . . . . This happens with canned items, frozen food, produce, dog food, and many other items.”

About a year later, the couple decided to do an experiment after Michelle did a morning shop that, they said, yielded five overcharges out of 10 items purchased. After she showed pictures of the sale tags, she said, a Kroger staffer fixed the overcharges on her bill.

The couple returned later that afternoon and selected the same items as before. The same five overcharges, they said, rang up again – Kroger had corrected the problem on Michelle’s bill that morning but, hours later, still hadn’t fixed it within its pricing systems or on its shelf tags.

She said she told Kroger staff that continuing to overcharge customers after being put on notice is “called stealing.” 

The couple said the problem has not slowed down since then – and that Kroger needs to take responsibility for making sure the prices on its shelf tags are accurate.

“If that sticker is hanging below that item, that’s what the price is,” Michelle said. “It’s their fault for not taking that sticker off.”

Across the nation 

Kroger is not the only supermarket megachain to face allegations of unfair pricing practices. In 2024, Walmart agreed to pay $45 million to settle a class action lawsuit in Florida that accused Walmart of overcharging American customers for meat, poultry, pork, seafood and bagged citrus fruit. In October, Albertsons, which also owns Safeway and Vons, agreed to pay a nearly $4 million civil penalty to settle allegations in California that the chain charged customers prices higher than their lowest advertised or posted price.

Walmart and Albertsons denied wrongdoing. 

Kroger’s own pricing practices have been flagged in lawsuits in multiple states. In Utah, Kroger paid a $2,500 settlement in 2019 to a shopper who accused the company of “falsely and deceptively charging full prices instead of the advertised promotional pricing” covered by a Fresh Values rewards program.

Lawsuits currently being fought in California, Ohio and Illinois claim Kroger stores soaked large numbers of consumers at checkout. The California case alleges the company raised prices of products when shoppers used grocery coupons and the Ohio case claims it gouged pharmacy customers who have health insurance by inflating the price of generic drugs.

The Illinois suit alleges that the lead plaintiff, Lisabeth Gainsberg, repeatedly encountered overcharges when she purchased on-sale items at a Kroger-owned Mariano’s store in suburban Chicago – including Slim Jim Sticks on sale for 92¢ each that were rung up at $1.79 per stick. When she pointed out these overcharges, the suit claims, store employees strung her along for half an hour or more before correcting the overcharges.

The suit says she spent months urging the store manager and corporate higher ups to fix the issue, but Kroger continued to charge more for many items than its posted sale prices.

Kroger has denied wrongdoing in the case that was settled in Utah and in the current cases in Illinois, Ohio and California. In the Illinois case, Kroger said it “has not engaged in any deceptive act.” It contends that Gainberg has not produced any evidence that “the price discrepancies at issue were anything other than random mistakes” in a situation “where perfection cannot possibly be achieved.”

Beyond the courts, government regulatory agencies are also hearing complaints about Kroger’s price tag issues. In March a shopper in Arlington, Texas, contacted the FTC to report that their local Kroger has been leaving out-of-date disount tags up throughout the store, resulting in overcharges, for about five years.

The shopper said they had tried almost everything to stop the practice: They talked to store employees, Kroger’s corporate office, and the Better Business Bureau. But the customer has “not received a satisfactory response,” the FTC said.

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.

Kroger policy allows for no more than 1% of price tags to be incorrect, according to an internal company document obtained by the news organizations. At one Kroger-owned store in the western US, the document shows, an in-house audit of hundreds of products found that roughly 6% had incorrect price tags directly leading to overcharges.

In many cases, Kroger’s overcharges may seem small – a few cents more on one mislabeled item, a dollar on another. But those inflated prices add up in an era of big worries about food prices. In a MarketWatch survey in April, 63% of Americans agreed with the statement: “It is difficult for me to afford groceries.” 

The squeeze is especially tight for lower income families, which spend about 30% of their incomes on food.

“If you don’t care about money, carry on,” Jim Howell in Sandusky wrote in his Facebook blast about Kroger’s pricing practices. “If you do care about money, you may want to jot your pricing down and do an audit. It adds up quick!”

Consumer Reports, The Guardian, and the Food & Environment Reporting Network had shoppers check price tags at 26 Kroger and Kroger-owned stores in 14 states and the District of Columbia. 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.