NEW YORK (AP) — Instacart said Monday that it’s ending a program where some customers saw different prices for the same product ordered at the same time from the same store when using the delivery company’s service.

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The program was meant to help grocers and other retailers learn more about what kinds of prices customers would pay for items, similar to how stores offer different prices for the same products at different locations. But it raised alarms after a report from Consumer Reports and two progressive advocacy groups, Groundwork Collaborative and More Perfect Union, said Instacart offered nearly three out of every four grocery items to shoppers at multiple prices in an experiment.

“At a time when families are working exceptionally hard to stretch every grocery dollar, those tests raised concerns, leaving some people questioning the prices they see on Instacart,” the company said in a Monday blog post. “That’s not okay – especially for a company built on trust, transparency, and affordability.”

Retailers will continue to set their own prices on the delivery website and they may still offer different prices at different brick-and-mortar locations, Instacart said, but “from now on, Instacart will not support any item price testing services.”

Instacart said these services were neither “ dynamic pricing,” a system where the price for something can go up when demand is high, nor “surveillance pricing,” where prices can be set based on a user’s income, shopping history or other personal information. Instead, the company said it was offered to customers at random.

Some customers would simply see a slightly higher price for an item, while others would see a slightly lower price. The experiment by Consumer Reports and the two progressive advocacy groups, for example, found that Instacart customers saw one of five different prices for the same dozen of Lucerne eggs from a Safeway store in Washington, D.C.: $3.99, $4.28, $4.59, $4.69, or $4.79.

Instacart had been offering the price-testing service to retailers since 2023. The company declined to say how many customers may have been affected, but it will end the service, effective immediately.

Last week, in a separate case, Instacart agreed to pay $60 million in customer refunds to settle federal allegations of deceptive practices. The Federal Trade Commission had accused Instacart of falsely advertising free deliveries and not clearly disclosing service fees, which add as much as 15% to an order and must be paid for customers.

Instacart denied FTC allegations of wrongdoing and said it reached a settlement in order to move forward and focus on its business.

“Trust is earned through clarity and consistency,” Instacart said in its blog post Monday. “Customers should never have to second-guess the prices they’re seeing.”

By KONSTANTIN TOROPIN and AAMER MADHANI, Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — The White House is expected to announce plans Monday to build a new, large warship that President Donald Trump is calling a “battleship” as part of a larger vision to create a “Golden Fleet,” according to people familiar with the plans.

Retired Rear Adm. Mark Montgomery, who is now a senior director at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and familiar with the discussions, said the announcement will include a new, large “surface combatant class” of ship and as many as 50 support ships.

The announcement will come just a month after the Navy scrapped its plans to build a new, small warship, citing growing delays and cost overruns, deciding instead to go with a modified version of a Coast Guard cutter that was being produced until recently.

Trump is to be joined by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Navy Secretary John Phelan for what is being billed by the White House as a “major announcement.”

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Trump plans to discuss a shipbuilding initiative, according to a White House official who was not authorized to comment publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.

It’s being unveiled at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort while he vacations in Florida and as U.S. forces take part in operations in the Caribbean that Trump says are aimed at stemming the flow of illegal drugs into the U.S. and beyond and mounting pressure on Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro’s government.

Montgomery said that while he supports the idea to build more support ships, he was critical of the plan to build a new battleship-like warship.

Historically, the term battleship has referred to a very specific type of ship — a large, heavily armored vessel armed with massive guns designed to bombard other ships or targets ashore. This type of ship was at the height of prominence during World War II, and the largest of the U.S. battleships, the Iowa-class, were roughly 60,000 tons.

After World War II, the battleship’s role in modern fleets diminished rapidly in favor of aircraft carriers and long-range missiles. The U.S. Navy did modernize four Iowa-class battleships in the 1980s by adding cruise missiles and anti-ship missiles, along with modern radars, but by the 1990s all four were decommissioned.

Trump has long held strong opinions on specific aspects of the Navy’s fleet, sometimes with a view toward keeping older technology instead of modernizing.

During his first term, he unsuccessfully called for the return to steam-powered catapults to launch jets from the Navy’s newest aircraft carriers instead of the more modern electromagnetic system.

He has also complained to Phelan about the look of the Navy’s destroyers and decried Navy ships being covered in rust.

Phelan told senators at his confirmation hearing that Trump “has texted me numerous times very late at night, sometimes after one (o’clock) in the morning” about “rusty ships or ships in a yard, asking me what am I doing about it.”

On a visit to a shipyard that was working on the now-canceled Constellation-class frigate in 2020, Trump said he personally changed the design of the ship.

“I looked at it, I said, ‘That’s a terrible-looking ship, let’s make it beautiful,’” Trump said at the time.

The Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development recently unveiled $91.7 million in public infrastructure loans and grants to support projects in 26 cities. The funding will replace nearly 1,000 lead service lines in 15 cities and back water treatment plants in Hastings and Maplewood, among other projects coordinated through the Minnesota Public Facilities Authority.

Maplewood

The largest subsidized loan went to St. Paul Regional Water Services, which received $28 million toward financing construction of the new $250 million McCarrons drinking water treatment plant that opened this year in Maplewood. The funds, which will be paid back over 20 years, also will be put toward final site work, including grading, paving and the installation of several stormwater ponds and the demolition of old, decommissioned infrastructure. The plant, which serves 14 cities in the east metro, is installing a new water quality testing lab in a building previously dedicated to flocculation, the process of getting particles to clump together for easier removal.

Hastings

The city of Hastings received $9.9 million in grants and loans toward construction of a new water treatment plant to remove chemical contaminants known as PFAS, as well as construction of a raw water transmission line to the plant. Work on the Central Water Treatment Plant began this year at 1290 North Frontage Road, which is next to the existing nitrate treatment plant and ground storage reservoir owned by the city. The plant, which will remove PFAS from Wells 3, 5 and 7, is expected to be fully online by mid-2027.

Stillwater

In Stillwater, a $1.2 million grant will be used to replace galvanized water services with new copper services, said Assistant City Administrator Shawn Sanders. The city has roughly 700 of those types of water services remaining, according to Sanders, and the grant will be used to replace about 100 of them. This is the second year Stillwater has received such a grant, he said.

Funding for the water-related projects primarily comes from MPFA’s Clean Water Revolving Fund and the Drinking Water Revolving Fund. Projects also are being backed by MPFA’s Point Source Implementation Grant program, Water Infrastructure Fund and Small Community Wastewater Treatment Program.

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“To be sure, a small (and often overstated) segment of rent stabilized buildings face real financial distress. Adding to the rent burdens of a million households to save these outliers makes little sense.”

The most recent Rent Guidelines Board vote in June. (Adi Talwar/City Limits)

By packing the Rent Guidelines Board with members of his choosing, Mayor Eric Adams has made his move to derail Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s campaign promise to freeze rents for the city’s 1 million rent stabilized households.     

With few exceptions, the Board’s five public members generally control the outcome of the annual guideline setting process. One public member, Alex Armlovich, will serve out a term lasting through 2026.  A second public member, Arpit Gupta, has been reappointed to a term also set to expire at the end of 2026. And a third public member, newly appointed Liam Finn, will also serve out a term expiring at the end of 2026.  

These 11th hour appointments run afoul of customary deference to an incoming mayor and undermine a clear democratic mandate for leadership committed to a more affordable city. More critically, they seek to condemn rent stabilized tenants to a continuation of unwarranted rent increases. 

There are several metrics for determining whether past rent adjustments have been appropriate. Public debate over rent increases routinely apply misleading metrics and miscast the relevant data.  

In general, the board’s legal mandate is to limit the effects of the city’s housing shortage on rent increases. Landlords should be able to collect enough rent to cover operating costs and ensure that their net income will not be eroded by inflation. At the same time, the system protects against exploitive rent increases landlords would otherwise be able to extract from tenants searching for scarce apartments.  

At its annual meetings and hearings, the Rent Guidelines Board receives a deluge of statistics about the economic health of the housing stock and conditions faced by tenants. Only a few of those statistics speak to whether the board has satisfied its legal mandate. Those numbers demonstrate that the board has indeed gone off track: Several data sources establish that landlords have, in fact, been overcompensated. 

From 1990 to 2023 (the first and last year the board received comprehensive data on building income and expenses) average net operating income for rent stabilized buildings has risen 48 percent after adjusting for inflation. This growth was a product of increases authorized by both statutory changes and the actions of the Rent Guidelines Board. 

Had the board adopted guidelines precisely aimed at covering all cost increases and protecting net operating income from the effects of inflation since 1990 (and disregarding the effects of statutory changes on rents), it would have authorized cumulative increases totaling 228 percent. 

In fact, the board authorized increases totaling 236 percent—an 8 percent gap that favors owners. That gap was once as high as 39 percent.  An inexcusably slow effort to narrow the gap began during the de Blasio administration. Even if the gap were closed, rent burdens will continue to suffer from massive rent increases brought about by statutory deregulation, vacancy bonuses and other increases that were in place until finally curbed by Albany in 2019.  

To be sure, a small (and often overstated) segment of rent stabilized buildings face real financial distress. Adding to the rent burdens of a million households to save these outliers makes little sense. Reforming existing programs and crafting new ones to lower costs and finance needed repairs for these struggling buildings is a more precise and fitting remedy.  

While the Board’s staff reports that some 9 percent of the stabilized stock is not meeting its expenses, the precise economic problems faced by these buildings are difficult to discern. How many hold a number of the tens of thousands of stabilized apartments being deliberately held off the market? How many are being emptied with an eye toward demolition or rehabilitation? How many are simply operated by grossly incompetent and neglectful owners? 

Given the paucity of annual “hardship” applications for special rent increases available within the current system, it is clear that the primary impediments to solvency are not rent limits.  More likely, tenant affordability limits, leading to non-payment of rent and expensive eviction proceedings, along with owners deliberately holding units off the market for development or rehab, explains most of the 9 percent figure.

Owners and their allies will assert that rent increases have not kept up with operating costs since 2019. That time frame is selective and misleading. What the public is not told is that relatively lower rent guidelines in recent years have served as a long overdue correction for grossly excessive adjustments adopted from 2009 to 2014. 

Those rent hikes caused the greatest tenant rent burdens on record. By 2014 the average stabilized household spent over 36 percent of their income on rent—and those burdens persisted into the COVID years. By contrast, in 1970, during the first full year of rent stabilization, the average rent burden for stabilized households was 22 percent of income.

At a gut level most New Yorkers have known for years that there is something wrong with the system. By the numbers, they were right. Last November they voted for a change. 

The new mayor should be allowed to do the job he was elected to do.

Timothy Collins is the former executive director of the NYC Rent Guidelines Board, author of An Introduction to the NYC Rent Guidelines Board and the Rent Stabilization System – Rent Guidelines Board and a partner in the law firm of Collins Dobkin & Miller LLP. Sam Stein is a senior policy analyst at the Community Service Society of New York.*

*CSS is among City Limits’ funders. 

The post Opinion: By the Numbers, a Rent Freeze Is Warranted appeared first on City Limits.