Overcharged at the grocery store? How to check your receipt

A bag of flour tortillas has a sale tag at $2.99. At the register it rings up at $4.99.

That exact case was one of more than 150 overcharged items found in 2025, when Consumer Reports, The Guardian and the Food & Environment Reporting Network shopped 26 Kroger-owned stores in 14 states and Washington, D.C. The average overcharge was $1.70 an item. Most of them came from sale tags that had expired and were still on the shelf.

That’s worth knowing before you look at your receipt, because it means the most common overcharge isn’t a mistake printed on it. The receipt is right about what you were charged. What it can’t show you is what you were promised. That was on the shelf.

Check the tag before you check the receipt

• Read the dates on sale tags. Many print when the sale ends. An expired tag that nobody took down is exactly how the Kroger overcharges happened.
• Take a photo of the tag for anything you’re buying because of its sale price. It takes two seconds, and at the service desk it’s the only evidence of the price you were offered.
• Watch the screen as sale items scan. Fixing a price at the register is faster than fixing it from the parking lot.

Four checks the receipt can do on its own

At home, the receipt still catches a different kind of mistake: the ones where the paper contradicts itself, or contradicts what’s in your bags.

1. Is the discount under the item it belongs to?

Stores print discounts in different ways, but they print them next to the item. Kroger’s own help pages say digital offer discounts appear below the qualifying item, and digital coupons show up as ecpn. Safeway prints the regular price and the card savings under the line:

HONEY NUT CEREAL          2.50 S
Regular Price      4.29
Card Savings       1.79-

4.29 minus 1.79 is the 2.50 charged. If you bought something for its sale price and there’s no savings line under it, the sale wasn’t applied, whatever the tag said.

2. Does the count match the bag?

A double scan shows up one of two ways: the same line twice, or one line with a quantity in front of it. Safeway, for example, prints 3 QTY ORG CILANT for three organic cilantro. Count what came home against what the receipt says came home.

3. Weight times price per pound

Anything weighed at the register prints a weight and a price per pound. Multiply them. A line reading 1.84 lb @ 2.99 /lb should come to $5.50. (Those numbers are an illustration, not a receipt.) If the charge is different, the weight or the rate was wrong.

Then think about the container. You pay for the food, not what it was weighed in. The allowance for the container is called tare, and some receipts print it; Whole Foods puts Tare Weight under weighed items. If you filled a heavy container at a salad bar or a bulk bin and no tare appears, it’s a fair question to ask.

4. Is the tax only on what should be taxed?

In the US, sales tax is added at the bottom rather than included in the shelf price, so the item lines add up to less than the total unless nothing was taxable. Most receipts mark each line with a letter for its tax status. The letters aren’t standardized: on the Walmart receipts I’ve read they’re X, N and Y, and Walmart doesn’t publish a key. Whether groceries are taxed at all depends on your state.

The check that works everywhere: items of the same kind should carry the same letter. If one loaf of bread is flagged differently from the other, ask why.

If you were charged more than the shelf said

Take the receipt and the photo of the tag to the service desk. Most stores correct it on the spot.

If they don’t, the law is often on your side. In California, charging more than the lowest price posted on the item or on its shelf tag is unlawful (Business and Professions Code §12024.2). Other states have their own price-accuracy rules, and a few go further than a refund; Michigan’s scanner law is the best known. Your state or county weights and measures office enforces these rules and takes complaints.

Keep the receipt either way. It’s the only record of what you actually paid.

The overcharge no single receipt shows

Everything above catches a price that is wrong today. The harder one is a price that is correct and still higher than it used to be: a regular price that has crept up, or a sale price that is now what you used to pay without a sale. Nothing on one receipt can show that. It only shows up next to the last few times you bought the same thing, and by then those receipts are usually gone. That’s what a price book is for.

Where CartEncore fits

The free receipt scanner turns a receipt into a table, line by line, so the checks above take a minute instead of squinting at thermal paper. If the lines it read don’t add up to the total printed at the bottom, it says so. That almost always means it misread something, so check the paper. It doesn’t know what the shelf tag said, and it can’t tell you whether the store made a mistake.

CartEncore itself keeps every line of every receipt, so when a price looks wrong you can see what you paid the last few times. Once there are three comparable purchases it shows your usual price.

How the big US chains print their receipts: itemized grocery receipts, chain by chain →
A line you can’t read at all: what is this item on my receipt? →