Derek and Allison Hadfield experienced something infuriating when they shopped at their local Kroger grocery in Belpre, Ohio, a town of about 6,600 across the Ohio River from West Virginia. Via The Guardian:
When they tried to save money by buying items 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 8oz jar of minced garlic listed at the 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.
