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The Guardian - US
The Guardian - US
World
Ted Genoways, Michael Hudson, Derek Kravitz and Theodore Ross

‘Customers are being duped’: how murky grocery sales tactics are squeezing some Kroger shoppers

Derek and Allison Hadfield became more and more fed up whenever they shopped for their family of four at their local Kroger grocery in Belpre, Ohio, a town of about 6,600 across the Ohio River from West Virginia.

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!”

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