The practice, known as surveillance pricing, appears to go back to Instacart's 2022 acquisition of Eversight, an AI pricing company. In the company's 2023 shareholder letter, Instacart described one of its tools, "smart rounding," as "a machine learning-driven tool that helps retailers improve price perception and drive incremental sales."CR and Groundwork Collaborative recruited 437 volunteers across four cities to shop on Instacart for identical items at the same stores simultaneously. Three-quarters of t ...