Right now, across the country, shoppers are loading their carts with items marked “on sale” — and then getting charged full price at the register. It’s happening at Kroger. It’s happening at Walmart. It’s even happening at Aldi. And unless you’re the kind of person who checks every line on your receipt (be honest, you’re not), there’s a decent chance you’ve already been hit by this and didn’t know it.
The Sale Tag That Isn’t Actually a Sale
Here’s how it works. You walk down the aisle, see a tag advertising a discount — maybe $2.49 instead of $4.99 on a bag of pistachios — and toss it in your cart. Seems straightforward. But the sale expired days ago, sometimes weeks ago, and nobody pulled the tag. So when the item scans at checkout, it rings up at full price. You don’t notice because you’re wrangling kids, or answering a text, or just trying to get out of the store before you impulse-buy another bag of chips.
A monthslong investigation by Consumer Reports, The Guardian, and the Food & Environment Reporting Network found this problem is far from rare. Shoppers they recruited to visit 26 Kroger and Kroger-owned stores in 14 states found expired sales labels leading to overcharges on more than 150 grocery items. Cheerios, Mucinex, boneless beef, salmon, Nescafé instant coffee, dog food — the list is long and kind of depressing.
$1.70 Per Item Adds Up Faster Than You Think
The average overcharge investigators found was $1.70 per item. That’s roughly 18.4 percent more than the advertised sale price. Doesn’t sound like a lot, right? But think about how many “sale” items you buy in a single trip. Four? Six? Ten? Over the course of a month, that’s real money walking out of your wallet for discounts that technically don’t exist anymore.
One-third of the expired sale tags were out of date by at least 10 days. Five products had prices that had been expired for more than 90 days. Three months! That’s not a minor clerical error — that’s a tag that’s been sitting there through an entire season while employees walked past it every single day. And this was across multiple store brands that Kroger owns, including Harris Teeter, Fred Meyer, Fry’s, and Ralphs.
Kroger, for its part, called the findings “a few dozen examples across several years out of billions of customer transactions annually.” They said the characterization of widespread pricing concerns is “patently false.” Which, okay, sure. But also — 150 items across 26 stores in a single investigation isn’t exactly a rounding error.
Wait, It’s Not Just Kroger?
No. Not even close. In 2024, Albertsons paid almost $400 million to settle a lawsuit accusing it of overcharging customers at hundreds of Albertsons, Safeway, and Vons locations across California. The accusations included false advertising and unfair competition for charging more than the lowest advertised price. Some items sold by weight — produce, meats, baked goods — actually contained less product than the package label stated.
Roundy’s, which is a Kroger subsidiary operating in Wisconsin, agreed to pay $1 million in a settlement over product weight and labeling violations. Investigators found over 1,200 products where the net weight was less than what customers paid for, with an average overcharge of $1.44 per item. One item was overpriced by $7.04. For a single grocery product! Former Los Angeles County District Attorney George Gascón said this kind of corporate conduct is “especially egregious when it comes to essential groceries.” Hard to argue with that.
The Employee Side Nobody Talks About
So why don’t store employees just fix the tags? Well, they would if they could. The investigation was partly sparked by Kroger workers in Colorado — currently in labor union negotiations — who alleged that the pricing errors have been going on for years and that the company is well aware of the problem. They’re understaffed and stretched thin. Updating shelf tags sounds simple until you realize a single store might carry 30,000 items or more.
Joy Alexander, an employee at a Kroger-owned King Soopers store, told reporters that it bothers her. “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,” she said. Customers assume the shelf price is what they’ll pay. Why wouldn’t they?
After the investigation was published in May 2025, Kroger announced it would be hiring an additional 15,000 employees to “enhance the customer experience.” Several employees told Consumer Reports that managers directed them to correct all erroneous price tags within days. Kroger disputed that claim, saying it issued no such orders. Somebody’s not telling the whole truth there, but you can draw your own conclusions.
A Local News Team Tested It — and Found the Same Thing
Does this actually happen at regular stores near you, though? WRAL’s consumer team in North Carolina went to find out. They visited three stores in Cary — an Aldi, a Walmart, and a Harris Teeter — picked three sale items at each, and checked what happened at the register.
At Aldi, peppers advertised at $2.49 rang up at $2.95. At Walmart, a case of water listed at $4.97 scanned at its original price of $5.97. The Harris Teeter, ironically enough, got everything right that day. Cashiers at Aldi and Walmart fixed the prices quickly when the errors were pointed out. But that’s the thing — most shoppers never point them out because they never notice.
Jason Fowler, a retired teacher from Holly Springs, bought five Tostitos products at Harris Teeter that were advertised as “Buy 2, Get 3 Free.” The sale wasn’t honored. He did the math and realized he’d paid more than 120 percent of what he should have. “I’m thinking, ‘Wow, those are some expensive chips,'” he said. He got a refund, but he wondered how many other people got hit with the same overcharge and never looked twice.
Legal Trouble Is Piling Up
Is any of this actually illegal? Lawyers and consumer advocates say yes. Kroger has already defended itself against multiple class-action lawsuits alleging pricing errors, filed by customers in California, Illinois, Ohio, and Utah. Legal experts who reviewed the Consumer Reports findings said Kroger’s price tag errors could violate both federal and state consumer protection laws.
“People should pay the price that is being advertised, that’s the law,” said Edgar Dworsky, a consumer advocate who helped craft the first grocery pricing protection law in Massachusetts nearly 40 years ago. Nina DiSalvo, policy director at the nonprofit Towards Justice, called the scale of the errors “deeply concerning.” And in June 2025, U.S. Senator Ruben Gallego of Arizona sent a letter to Kroger’s interim CEO, urging the company to prevent price tag errors and reimburse affected customers. He specifically cited the FTC Act, which prohibits unfair or deceptive acts in commerce.
Kroger owns 130 Fry’s grocery stores across 34 Arizona cities, so this isn’t just abstract policy for Gallego’s constituents. It’s their weekly grocery bill.
Digital Price Tags Might Fix This — Eventually
Walmart has started rolling out digital shelf labels in some stores. These electronic tags can be updated automatically, which eliminates the gap between when a sale ends and when a human employee physically replaces the paper tag. A Walmart spokesperson told WRAL that an employee was “likely pulled away during the price change process,” causing a short-term gap that led to the overcharge. Digital tags supposedly fix that by changing everything at once.
That sounds promising, but it’s not widespread yet. Most grocery stores in America still use paper tags that somebody has to swap out by hand. And when stores are short-staffed — which is most of the time — those tags sit there. Expired. Misleading. Costing you money.
What You Can Actually Do About It
The most practical advice is also the most annoying: pay attention. Take a photo of the sale tag before you put the item in your cart. Then check the price at checkout. If it doesn’t match, say something. Stores will almost always correct the price on the spot. Some states even have laws requiring stores to give you the item free or at a further discount if the scanned price exceeds the shelf price.
You can also report problems. In North Carolina, for instance, the Department of Agriculture’s Standards Division audits stores and fines repeat offenders. Other states have similar agencies. It takes a couple of minutes, and if enough people report the same store, regulators actually show up.
Look, nobody wants to become the person holding up the checkout line arguing about 46 cents on a bag of peppers. But when it’s happening on multiple items, every trip, across thousands of stores — the math stops being trivial. The stores know this. They’re counting on you being too busy or too tired to care. Maybe that’s the part that should bother us most.
