Investigation Confirms Kroger-owned King Soopers’ Chronic Understaffing of Stores Has Led to Deceptive Pricing for Consumers

For Immediate Release

May 15, 2025

Contact: Pam Aguado,

paguado@ufcw7.com | 303-425-0897 ext. 399

Denver, CO - A national news story by Consumer Reports was released on Wednesday morning showing how Kroger is over-charging customers on numerous items at many stores across the nation, including Kroger owned King Soopers and City Market stores in Colorado. Consumer Reports’ investigation began after UFCW Local 7’s own findings that chronic understaffing in stores has led to rampant over-charging and inaccuracy in prices paid at the register in Colorado grocery stores. Consumer Reports found that on average, pricing discrepancies led to customers being overcharged by an average of 18% on mismarked items.

Local 7’s own investigation, which surveyed dozens of King Soopers & City Market stores across the state, found that misleading prices leading to the over-charging of consumers were present on items in every one of the surveyed stores – and that the scale of this problem has led to King Soopers and City Market potentially taking millions of dollars each year from Colorado consumers through false pricing. These findings were shared with government officials in Colorado including Attorney General Phil Weiser.

“Consumer Reports has confirmed what workers have been telling King Soopers and City Market for months now – that chronic understaffing in grocery stores prevents the company from making sure the prices on the shelves match the price a customer is paying at the register. When Kroger dictates that workers’, hours be cut in these stores, it is customers who pay the price,” said Kim Cordova, UFCW Local 7 President. Cordova added, “Now is the time for consumers to tell Kroger executives that the public does not want to pay for Kroger’s understaffing problem.”

Customers across the nation have seen their cost of groceries go up much faster than overall inflation in the last several years, which has led to record profits for Kroger and other grocers. Far from investing these record profits into stores and workers – Kroger has been slashing its workforce – cutting the total number of hours worked here in Colorado stores by some 18.3% from 2019 to 2023 according to government data. Instead of investing in stores and workers, Kroger has chosen to make massive giveaways to Wall Street, recently announcing a $7.5 Billion accelerated dividend to shareholders.

As Joy Alexander, a Scan Coordinator at a King Soopers store in Denver described, “In a typical week, Kroger asks us to hang thousands of new and updated tags throughout the store reflecting price changes on thousands of products. Yet because so few hours are scheduled to hang these tags, the work of hanging each week’s tags almost never gets done before the next week’s tags arrive.”

King Soopers and City Market, who operate over 150 Kroger-owned stores in Colorado, have failed to address these deceptive prices. In fact, the only remedy the company does is a “Make it Right” policy, essentially that if a customer catches King Soppers over-charging them, the store will correct the mistake. Most of the time customers don’t even check their receipt, far less call out the price error and get a clerk to inspect the claim. “Make it Right” is of no consequence except for the rare customer that does actually catch the issue.

Inadequate staffing compounds the pricing errors, because customers face long lines and pressure to use self-checkout machines where they are less likely to find price discrepancies. These longer lines also make customers more hesitant to address pricing issues due to the long wait they have already faced.

In response to the story from Consumer Reports, Kroger has announced it is hiring some 15,000 workers. Yet the Company’s release makes no mention of whether this hiring is for newly created jobs or just dealing with standard turnover in the stores. With more than 400,000 employees nationwide, the announcement from Kroger represents approximately 3 percent of its current workforce – meaning even if these 15,000 positions actually represented new hires and increased staffing – the effort is little more than a drop in the proverbial bucket.

“It is time for government regulators to hold King Soopers & City Market accountable for deceiving their customers”, said Kim Cordova. Cordova continued, “These employers have the opportunity to address the underlying staffing crisis at the bargaining table and fix this issue for both workers and consumers”.

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Local 7, the largest private-sector Union in Colorado, is affiliated with United Food and Commercial Workers International Union which represents over 1.3 million workers in the United States and Canada, and is one of the largest private-sector Unions in North America. UFCW members work in a wide range of industries, including retail food, food processing, agriculture, retail sales, and health care.