Instacart’s Secret Price Tiers
We recruited over 400 people across the country to do something simple: shop for groceries on Instacart. What we found was anything but simple. People were being sorted into different price groups and charged different amounts for the same items. The scariest part? It’s potentially in physical stores.
What surprised me:
Target told us they don’t set prices on Instacart. That completely upended our investigation. Instacart had insisted from the beginning they were just a neutral platform. Retailers control everything. We’d structured our entire reporting around that claim. When Target’s response came in first, I immediately went back to check Instacart’s answers about who sets prices and the electronic shelf labels. Nothing was adding up anymore.
What got cut:
Columbia Business School professor Len Sherman had this whole explanation of why a few pennies matter – how small price increases on everyday goods generate massive profits at scale. We planned to pair it with an animation showing the math. But it slowed everything down. We ended up using Uber’s experience as the stand-in instead: algorithmic pricing rolls out, rider prices go up year after year, company goes from burning cash to printing money. Same point, much faster.
The Lie So Dangerous Tesla Engineers Are Quitting
For nearly a decade Tesla promised self-driving cars. This summer, we got to see what that actually looked like. It wasn’t pretty. While Tesla failed to deliver on their promise, they sold early versions of the technology to hundreds of thousands of people, calling it “Autopilot” and “Full Self-Driving.” Now a California lawsuit could hold Tesla accountable.
What surprised me:
Everyone was reporting on how dangerous the Cybercab tests looked. Then I talked to Missy Cummings, who runs George Mason’s autonomous robotics lab. She told me the tests themselves were actually safe. Controlled routes, mapped environments, standard procedure. The real story was in the design itself. Tesla’s camera-only approach gets things wrong 3% of the time, and that’s a fundamental flaw you can’t engineer away.
What got cut:
The whole story of how Tesla got here. They made electric cars cool when no one else could. I truly think Tesla deserves credit for that. It’s still in the piece, but it’s a bit faster than I originally envisioned.