It happens all the time. You carefully select the sale-priced item at the grocery — a bottle of ketchup, tub of yogurt, bag of flour — only to get home and notice that your receipt shows the price was a buck or maybe even two bucks higher.
You think you might have grabbed the wrong thing or misread the price tag on the grocery shelf. Or you know damn well you got cheated but you’re too busy to go back to the store and ask for a refund, so you mutter your disgust to yourself and carry on.
It turns out you are not alone. Apparently, this is standard operating procedure at King Soopers, City Market and Kroger stores across the country.
A recent report in The Guardian found the problem is widespread across the nation’s second-largest grocery chain.
According to The Guardian, representatives of United Food & Commercial Workers Union Local 7 went undercover to perform secret shopping trips at more than 30 stores across Colorado in March. They documented overcharges averaging close to 15%.
Here’s how it happens.
The sale price tags are attached to store shelves while PLU (price look-up) codes are fixed to the products. Sale tags frequently remain on the store shelves long after they have expired, but prices on the PLUs are updated instantly through the computer systems.
So, if the stockers at the stores fall behind on updating the shelf price tags, you, the shopper, are left to feel like a chump in a bait-and-switch scheme when you are charged the higher price by the grocery scanners.
Some sharp-eyed shoppers are actually able to empty their shopping carts, pack their own grocery bags, swipe their loyalty cards, fumble through a pocketful of coupons and monitor the prices as they blink across the computer in the checkout lane. When these hurried shoppers, often with ringing cell phones in their pockets and crying toddlers hanging on their legs, see what looks like an inaccurate price, it doesn’t always end well.
“I’ve witnessed verbal altercations almost turn into fistfights,” Chris Lacey, a King Soopers service manager in Colorado, told The Guardian. “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.”
Union leaders said this issue was raised during contract negotiations this year, but little has been done to address the problem.
“With these price tags, we’ve told them, and they haven’t even flinched,” Kim Cordova, Local 7’s president and international vice-president for UFCW, told The Guardian.
The union has said the problem is caused by inadequate staffing in the stores — not enough people to monitor the shelf tags. Nationwide, the company’s workforce dropped from 465,000 in 2021 to 409,000 in 2025.
Kroger’s corporate response was to minimize the situation.
“While any error is unacceptable, the characterization of widespread pricing concerns is patently false,” it said in a statement.
In fairness, King Soopers is not the only place where you can feel fleeced at the checkout counter.
At Safeway, be sure to read the shelf stickers carefully or you might find yourself paying full price for items that are pitched as screamin’ deals. The sleight of hand this time? It’s a “digital-only” offer and if you’re not in their digital coupon database, tough luck.
And then there’s Costco derangement syndrome where we all think because it’s sold there, it must be a good deal. It’s how I spent $14 on a 34-ounce box of cereal recently.
Sure, it was my own fault, but still …
Food prices increased 23.6% between 2020 and 2024, and that has made shoppers less than understanding when they feel they’re being ripped off, which starts the minute they walk in the door and see the price of avocadoes.
Jeez, even McDonald’s has become special-occasion fare for a lot of families. Prices have increased 40% since 2019.
So, I hate to be the one to break it to corporate America, but pricing concerns are not merely widespread at this point, they’re cause for open rebellion.
If you doubt the power of consumer outrage over corporate management, just consider what’s happened to Tesla sales in 2025. Or all the successful boycotts from Sabra in 2024 and Pillsbury in 2022 to Ben & Jerry’s in 2021.
Shoppers are mad as hell about prices — and everything — right now and ignoring them is a really bad idea.
It’s how we ended up with a convicted felon and his clown car of incompetents running the country.
After all, last August he promised, “Starting on Day One, we will end inflation and make America affordable again, to bring down the prices of all goods.”
It turned out to be just another bait-and-switch.
Diane Carman is a Denver communications consultant.
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