Weights-and-measures inspectors in Columbus, Franklin County and the surrounding counties have repeatedly caught Kroger stores charging more at the register than the price on the shelf, according to four years of public inspection records compiled in a report released this week.
The report comes from the Center for Responsible Food Business, an advocacy group that has run paid television ads against Kroger in Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee and Texas since May under the name “Kroger Hurts Families.” Much of the report rests on 2,520 shopper testimonials submitted through the group’s own campaign site, which the group says it has not independently verified. The inspection records are a different story. County auditors and the City of Columbus produced them under Ohio’s public-records law, and the group says it will share the full document set with anyone who asks.
What the inspection records show
The group requested every Kroger price-verification inspection from 2022 through mid-2026 from nine Ohio jurisdictions: Franklin, Delaware, Licking, Fairfield, Butler, Hamilton, Montgomery and Lucas counties, plus the City of Columbus, which runs its own program separate from the Franklin County Auditor’s. The records cover 389 inspections at 101 stores and 45,821 items scanned against the shelf tag.
Fifty-eight of those inspections, 15 percent, failed. Thirty-six of the 101 stores were caught overcharging at least once. Inspectors logged 644 wrong prices in all. Of those, 474 rang up higher than the tag and 170 rang up lower, so the errors favored Kroger nearly three to one. Across all nine jurisdictions, the overcharges averaged more than 20 percent of the item’s price.
The central Ohio numbers run worse than that average. The report says the City of Columbus’s own published statistics put the average overcharge in its Kroger inspections at 32.2 percent of the item’s price. At one Worthington store, a single 2025 inspection found twelve items overcharged and none undercharged, for a 76 percent accuracy score. In eight of the ten Columbus complaint investigations the city turned over, the store failed the follow-up inspection, was cited, or the inspector confirmed the mispriced item.
Two citations came the same week last November. On Nov. 4, 2025, a Licking County inspector failed the Hebron Kroger at 86 percent accuracy and issued a notice of violation under Ohio’s misrepresentation-of-price statute. The store scored 100 percent when it was rechecked 15 days later. In Columbus that week, a city inspector confirmed a shopper’s complaint that Gevalia coffee tagged at $8.49 was ringing up at $12.49 on a sale tag that had expired two weeks earlier, and cited the store under city code.
Most gaps in the records were small. Some were not. Inspectors documented a Conair styling tool tagged at $15.99 that rang up at $77.99, and cooking spray tagged at 49 cents that rang up at $3.29. The pattern matches a spring 2025 investigation by Consumer Reports, The Guardian and the Food and Environment Reporting Network, which found more than 150 expired sale tags ringing up at full price across 26 Kroger-owned stores, an average overcharge of $1.70 per item, or 18.4 percent.
What Kroger says
Kroger’s on-record answer to the campaign came in July. A spokesperson told the Journal-News in Butler County: “When we are made aware of any customer concerns, our associates are empowered to immediately make it right.” The company also told the paper it “does not, and never has, engaged in surveillance or surge pricing,” a separate accusation the group has raised.
What a shopper is owed after an overcharge is murky. Consumer Reports, citing internal company documents, described a “Make It Right” policy that lets employees fix price discrepancies on the spot, case by case. Older Kroger guidance promised a free item when something scanned higher than the shelf tag. Kroger’s current public statements describe on-the-spot fixes with no guaranteed free item. The report says shoppers get different answers from store to store, so ask at the service desk before assuming a store still honors the free-item rule.
What Ohio law actually says
Comment sections on these stories fill up with confident answers about what a store legally owes you when the register beats the shelf tag. Most of those answers describe another state’s law. Ohio has no scanner law like Michigan’s, which adds a bonus on top of the refund, or Massachusetts’s, where a grocery store that uses scanners instead of item stickers hands over the first mischarged item free if it costs $10 or less. Nothing in Ohio law makes a store give you the item free, and no Ohio statute sets an automatic payment to the shopper for each mistake. The free-item rule people remember at Kroger was store policy, not state law.
What Ohio law does say is narrower. The Consumer Sales Practices Act bars any unfair or deceptive act in a consumer sale, and it specifically lists claiming a price advantage that does not exist as deceptive. An expired sale tag is the kind of thing that provision describes. A second statute, in the weights and measures chapter, says no one may misrepresent the price of a commodity sold or advertised for sale by weight, measure, or count, or present a price in a way that tends to mislead. That is the statute the Licking County inspector cited at the Hebron store. The Consumer Sales Practices Act is what Attorney General Dave Yost used against Dollar General in late 2022, after county auditors in Butler, Montgomery and Franklin counties found shelf prices lower than register prices. His filings pair the price-advantage provision with the state’s bait advertising rule, which makes it deceptive to advertise goods at a price that is not a real offer to sell. Dollar General paid $1 million in 2023, and the settlement requires its Ohio clerks to charge the shelf price when a customer points out a mismatch at checkout and requires the tag to be corrected within 24 hours. That honor-the-tag rule binds Dollar General under a court order. It isn’t written into Ohio law for every store.
The 2 percent figure that shows up in inspection stories comes from the price-verification test the county and city programs run. State law points inspectors to a federal weights-and-measures handbook for the procedure. An inspector pulls a sample of items and compares each one’s checkout price to the lowest advertised, posted or marked price. A store passes when 98 percent of the sample matches. Undercharges count as errors in that test too, and overcharges are what drive the heavier penalties. The Kroger numbers in the campaign’s report came out of those same county and city inspection records.
If it happens to you, the practical fix is at the service desk. Point out the tag. Most stores will charge the tag price rather than argue, though outside the Dollar General order nothing in Ohio law requires it. The legal remedy exists but is small. The act lets a shopper sue to undo the sale or recover actual losses, which on a grocery overcharge means the difference between the two prices, plus a capped amount for non-money harm. A $200 minimum and triple damages apply only when the practice was already declared deceptive by rule or by an earlier court decision on file with the attorney general. The bait advertising rule is the closest fit, and the attorney general has used it against a chain for this exact practice, but whether a stale sale tag at a grocery store clears that bar is a question for a lawyer rather than a comment thread. Suits generally have to be filed within two years. The math rarely justifies a filing fee. The complaint is the part that tends to move things. Consumer Reports found the attorney general’s office had logged nearly 60 Kroger price complaints since 2021, and the Dollar General case grew out of county inspections. The local complaint routes are in the next section. A complaint to the Ohio Attorney General at 800-282-0515 lands in the same file that built the Dollar General case.
How to check, and where to report it
A shopper who never compares the receipt to the shelf has no way of knowing an overcharge happened. Photograph the shelf tag for anything on sale and watch the register display as each item scans. Read the receipt before leaving. The Franklin County Auditor’s consumer tips add two more steps: ask the clerk to check any price that looks wrong, then ask the manager to correct it. Keep the receipt.
If the store won’t fix it, or you want the pattern on record, the complaint goes to whichever program covers that store. Inside Columbus city limits, that’s the city’s Division of Weights and Measures, part of Building and Zoning Services, at (614) 645-7397, wms@columbus.gov, or its online consumer complaint form. Everywhere else in Franklin County, it’s the Franklin County Auditor’s weights-and-measures office at 614-525-4663 or the auditor’s online complaint form. Stores in Delaware, Licking and Fairfield counties fall under those county auditors. Have the item name, the shelf price, the price charged and the store ready. The county says an inspector usually visits within 24 to 48 hours of a complaint.
The report’s other central Ohio finding is about choice. Of the testimonials it received, 160 allege higher prices where Kroger is the only grocery store in town, a concern the group raises as Kroger’s deal to buy Giant Eagle moves ahead.
