Customers at Kroger stores like City Market and King Soopers — which operate roughly 150 locations across 36 cities in Colorado — have been paying full price for items labelled as discounted, a Consumer Reports investigation found.

The report, written by Consumer Reports in collaboration with The Guardian and the Food & Environment Reporting Network, originated from a tip from Kroger workers in Colorado. The workers, who are currently in labor union negotiations, claimed the company has knowingly had widespread errors on price labels for several years on items ranging “from meat and vegetables to juice, rice and alcohol,” the report states.

Kroger, one of the nation’s largest grocery store chains, denies the claims of widespread pricing errors in the report. The chain has already faced multiple class-action lawsuits over their pricing errors from customers in California, Illinois, Ohio and Utah.

“While any error is unacceptable, the characterization of widespread pricing concerns is patently false,” the company told Consumer Reports, adding that the chain regularly conducts price checks and is committed to affordable and accurate pricing.

Consumer Reports conducted the investigation by recruiting people to shop at 26 Kroger and Kroger-owned stores in 14 states, where shoppers found “expired sales labels that led to overcharges on more than 150 grocery items.” A third of the expired sales tags were out of date by at least 10 days, and the prices of five of the products were expired by at least 90 days, according to the report.

“The average overcharge we found was $1.70 per item, or 18.4 percent. Our findings suggest the typical Kroger shopper ends up paying far more for what they think are discounted items—all during a time of inflation and economic uncertainty,” Consumer Reports investigative reporter Derek Kravitz wrote. 

Shoppers who filed complaints to their state attorney general’s office were told by Kroger employees that their stores simply don’t have the staff to consistently update shelf tags, which is why some items ring up at a different price than what is physically advertised on shelves.

Kroger’s cuts to staff and hours are ongoing since 2019, data from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration shows. At Kroger-owned stores where the investigation found price tag errors, the average loss of employees between 2019 and 2024 was 10.3%.

Chris Lacey, a King Soopers service manager in Colorado, told Consumer Reports that when a customer complains about the pricing errors, employees are told to fix the price for the individual customer. The price tag itself isn’t always fixed after the encounter.

“Kroger executives have repeatedly been made aware of pricing problems in its stores, according to inspection and complaint records obtained by CR through state open-records laws,” the report states.

The pricing disparities are an even bigger hit to shoppers on the Western Slope, where a lack of competing grocery stores in some rural resort towns means groceries are automatically more expensive under Kroger’s pricing strategies.

After looking at the findings in the reports, lawyers and experts say Kroger’s price tag errors could violate federal and state consumer protection laws.

However, Consumer Reports also found that pricing errors were not a problem at all Kroger stores. Price tags were mostly up to date in almost half of the stores included in the investigation, and some stores have piloted digital tags that auto-update prices to ensure “better accuracy.”