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gig economy
Instacart, Stop Using American Shoppers as Lab Rats During an Affordability Crisis
The grocery delivery app is conducting large-scale, hidden pricing experiments on unsuspecting shoppers to determine just how much money they can extract from customers on the groceries they buy to feed their families.
Dec 26, 2025
Somewhere, a mom taps through her grocery app while waiting in the school pickup line, purchasing a box of Wheat Thins for $5.99. Across town, someone else scrolls through the same grocery app and adds the exact same box of Wheat Thins to their cart. For them, the crackers ring up at $6.99. It is the same item, from the same store, at the same time, but one unlucky shopper is stuck paying a higher price. Neither shopper has any idea this pricing game is even being played.
This is not a hypothetical scenario. Increasingly, it’s happening all over the country. Right now, grocery delivery app Instacart is conducting large-scale, hidden pricing experiments on unsuspecting shoppers to determine just how much money they can extract from customers on the groceries they buy to feed their families.
How do we know? Our team at Groundwork Collaborative had a feeling Instacart might be experimenting on shoppers, so we decided to run an experiment on them. Alongside our partners at Consumer Reports and More Perfect Union, we recruited over 400 volunteer secret shoppers to shop for the same basket of 20 items at the same grocery store at the same time. We ran the experiment in four different stores across the country.
The results were damning: At every store we tested, shoppers were charged different prices for an identical basket of groceries. Overall, Instacart basket totals varied by about 7%, with some items posting differences as high as 23%. For example: the exact same basket of groceries from a Safeway store in Seattle, Washington ran some shoppers $114.34, while other shoppers were charged $123.93. At a Target in North Canton, Ohio, prices varied by as much as $6, as some shoppers rang up a total of $84.43, while others were charged $87.91 or as much as $90.47.
Unfortunately, Instacart’s predatory pricing is just one small piece of a much larger–and rapidly growing–economy of extraction.
Based on the company’s own estimates, this “Instacart tax” could drain as much as $1,200 from American households’ pocketbooks each year.
Meanwhile, Instacart is gloating about their ability to use unaware shoppers as guinea pigs to pad their bottom line profits. On their website, the company notes that, “End shoppers are not aware that they’re in an experiment. For any given shopper in any given store, prices only change on a few of the products they shop and only by a small margin; it’s negligible.” But we’re facing the greatest food affordability crisis in a generation. As grocery prices continue to rise and reliance on Buy Now, Pay Later is accelerating, it is painfully evident that an additional $1,200 a year is anything but negligible for many American families.
Unfortunately, Instacart’s predatory pricing is just one small piece of a much larger–and rapidly growing–economy of extraction. Enabled by corporate consolidation and artificial intelligence technologies, companies across industries now deploy a dizzying array of tactics designed to extract maximum profit from each individual. They tack on hidden fees; collude with their competitors on price increases; and individualize prices for consumers based on granular, personal data.
These predatory pricing strategies are not about managing scarcity or efficient markets. They’re corporations experimenting with your willingness to pay to see exactly how much they can squeeze out of you.
Since its release last week, our report has struck a national chord—earning front-page coverage in the New York Times, primetime coverage on broadcast news, and featuring in a video that has already amassed nearly 2 million views. Instacart’s own stock even dropped 6% the day after our report was published, which the Wall Street Journal attributed in part to our investigation.
This reaction is unsurprising: Americans dislike being surveilled, they resent being gouged, and they certainly don’t like being lab rats for profit-driven experimentation. Fair and honest markets are the bedrock of a healthy economy—and companies like Instacart jeopardize that trust by making prices opaque and unpredictable.
Our message to Instacart—and any corporation that would try to replicate their pricing experiment—is simple. Close the labs. American shoppers are not guinea pigs.
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Gigs That Work For All
A California pilot program offers a new blueprint for workforce development.
Nov 19, 2025
For over a decade, academics and progressive policymakers have been fretting about the “future of work” and the “gigification” of labor. And for good reason. Since the ascendance of companies like Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, and Instacart in the early 2010s, hundreds of thousands of people have taken on the work of fulfilling “gigs” provided by such apps. Consumers have become habituated to getting their rides, groceries, and household goods at the push of a button.
Workers often turn to “gig” jobs because they need flexible work schedules due to caregiving responsibilities or the need for multiple jobs to make ends meet. However, this work is usually low paying, precarious, and unprotected by employment or labor laws. That’s by design, and it’s a big problem: Those laws were created with the intention of protecting just these sorts of workers. The companies behind the apps argue that this is simply the price of flexibility.
There’s no reason that flexible work should require sacrificing the protections, rights, and opportunities provided by employment, like a guaranteed minimum wage and overtime for long hours; the right to a healthy and safe workplace; protections against discrimination and harassment; and insurance against the downside risks arising from the loss of jobs or workplace injuries.
Treating workers as independent contractors without rights and protections has become standard practice for many platform companies. Promoted by venture capital funders, the practice feeds a narrative that the acquisition of skills, experience, and on-the-job savvy—traditionally a responsibility of employers—falls on individual workers to “entrepreneurially” pick up such training on the job. Yet this perspective contradicts a fundamental principle of workforce development, which recognized the wider economic benefits arising from building a skilled workforce.
The Long Beach pilot demonstrates that flexibility can also come with good jobs and opportunities to enhance skills while meeting pressing employer staffing needs.
An innovative public pilot in Long Beach has shown it is possible for gig work to benefit workers, employers, and the broader community. The Workers Lab, an organization that funds innovations for and with workers, and Pacific Gateway, the City of Long Beach’s public workforce board, have invested in a platform called WorkLB. The technology behind the platform, originally developed with the British Labor government, plays a matchmaking role by connecting employers and workers based on needs, skills, and schedules.
Pacific Gateway is demonstrating that flexible schedules and the opportunity to do short-term work can go hand in hand with decent earnings, protections, rights at work, and upward mobility. Moreover, the program shows that such opportunities can also benefit businesses and public agencies looking for workers and seeking to improve the workforce development system.
This simultaneously undermines the dominant narrative of a trade-off between flexibility and workers’ rights, and shows how government intervention can effectively address issues arising from the so-called Gig Economy.
The Long Beach model allows Pacific Gateway to either act as, or delegate the responsibility to vet and oversee workers, ensure proper payroll management, provide healthcare, abide by labor law, and pay for liability insurance.
To participate, employers must be willing to pay the local minimum wage (currently $16.50 per hour in Long Beach), with a markup of 2.5% ($0.40 per hr) to help defray the costs of administration. For workers, this unique model helps them find the best work opportunities based on their skills, interests, and scheduling needs. Whether short or long-term, these work opportunities are W-2 jobs providing good wages, benefits, and labor protections. All that, and flexibility.
Pacific Gateway credentials workers through its formal intake process, awarding them “badges” to market their skills. Unlike traditional, for-profit staffing agencies, which have also proliferated in the gig economy space, that treat workers’ skill levels as proprietary data, Pacific Gateway makes this information readily available to prospective employers.
By using a public workforce agency in this staffing agency role, Pacific Gateway is fulfilling the original intention of the federal Employment Services program—to match workers with employers, connect workers to the appropriate training opportunities, and then place them in actual jobs.
In a reversal of gig work common sense, WorkLB’s app allows workers to review their employers, which helps ensure that Pacific Gateway recruits employers providing good jobs rather than placing workers in exploitative and precarious work. While the app currently does not allow employers to rate the workers, it enables them to track the progression of a worker to incentivize full-time work conversion where desired.
Participating workers in Long Beach report high satisfaction with the program, saying that it provides quality jobs with transparent pay, clear expectations, and legal protections and allows them to demonstrate their skills to prospective employers. Employers get a vetted, skilled workforce for on-demand jobs that serve their longer-term workforce needs. The federal workforce system was created to do this, but perpetually lacks the funding to do so at the appropriate scale.
Given its success thus far, there is growing interest in adopting similar pilots in other parts of the country. Additionally, these pilots may provide a salient avenue for much-needed workforce development at the state and local level that meets both workers' and employers’ needs, especially as the current Trump administration slashes federal programs, such as Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, Medicaid, and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, and mandate greater work requirements that may impact state and local workforce funding. However, the greatest challenge is funding these pilots, especially as federal funding is cut. The Long Beach pilot was primarily funded through philanthropic dollars, but given the need to scale future efforts, public funding is critical. Now is the time for states and localities to think creatively, whether by developing sector-based partnerships with employers and unions where all partners have “skin in the game,” or identifying other public funding streams, to support this growing workforce.
Workers often accept low-paid and precarious gig jobs because they need them to shore up failing household budgets while juggling complicated schedules. The Long Beach pilot demonstrates that flexibility can also come with good jobs and opportunities to enhance skills while meeting pressing employer staffing needs, thereby benefiting workers, families, and the wider community.
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Casar-Tlaib Bill Would Ban Corporations From Using AI to Set Prices, Wages
"The idea that employers would leverage surveillance data to exploit a worker in a desperate position and offer them a lower wage is appalling," said Rep. Rashida Tlaib.
Jul 23, 2025
A pair of U.S. House progressives have introduced a bill that would stop companies from using artificial intelligence to set prices and wages based on the personal information of customers and workers.
The "Stop AI Price Gouging and Wage Fixing Act," introduced Wednesday by Reps. Greg Casar (D-Texas) and Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), is an effort to curb the growing trend of "surveillance-based price setting," where companies use data from customers to determine how much they are willing to pay for a service.
According to a recent report by the Federal Trade Commission, "Retailers frequently use people's personal information to set targeted, tailored prices for goods and services—from a person's location and demographics, down to their mouse movements on a webpage."
Casar said that "giant corporations should not be allowed to jack up your prices or lower your wages using data they got spying on you."
"Whether you know it or not, you may already be getting ripped off by corporations using your personal data to charge you more," he added. "This problem is only going to get worse, and Congress should act before this becomes a full-blown crisis."
Earlier this month, Delta Airlines announced a pilot program using an AI model to charge individual consumers the maximum amount it determines they are willing to pay for plane tickets. Delta has described the change as "a full reengineering of how we price, and how we will be pricing in the future."
Other companies have been accused of using similar forms of "surge pricing."
Uber, which has been suspected of jacking up prices on riders with low cellphone batteries, pioneered the method. Kroger and Walmart have used digital price tags on goods to rapidly change prices, and Kroger also says it is using facial recognition to track customers in order to offer targeted coupons.
Amazon has been accused of setting personalized prices based on customers' location and browsing history, and the Princeton Review has even been caught charging greater amounts for SAT prep services in Asian communities.
Companies also frequently use hidden algorithms based on personal data to pay workers different wages for the same work—an especially pervasive practice in gig economy jobs like rideshare and delivery driving.
A 2024 report by the Roosevelt Institute found that these algorithms were also being applied to nurses, who were offered shifts by an opaque algorithm based on who was willing to work for the lowest pay and a number of other undisclosed factors.
"It is shameful that companies would use our neighbors' sensitive personal information against them to raise prices," said Tlaib. "The idea that employers would leverage surveillance data to exploit a worker in a desperate position and offer them a lower wage is appalling."
The bill still allows companies to change prices for individuals based on certain circumstances. For example, they would still be allowed to offer discounts to certain groups like college students, veterans, and senior citizens or enact loyalty programs.
Likewise, wage-earners would still be allowed to receive overtime pay or bonuses for good work or have their salaries changed to accommodate the cost of living.
The bill instead targets companies that use underhanded and invasive tactics to take advantage of their customers' and employees' desperation.
"This bill draws a clear line in the sand: Companies can offer discounts and fair wages—but not by spying on people," said the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen. "Surveillance-based price gouging and wage setting are exploitative practices that deepen inequality and strip consumers and workers of dignity."
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