One product, two prices: digital and physical disagree
The in-store price and the same retailer's digital price for the identical item almost never match. Across 1,046 matched observations, they agree one percent of the time.
- Across 1,046 matched observations, the printed shelf tag and the same banner’s digital price agree one percent of the time.
- Each direction of the spread has an owner: a quiet delivery-context premium, or a promotion leaking margin in one channel.
- Transaction panels cannot see this at all. The only way to know what a shelf said is to have been in front of it.
Our measurement program reads the printed shelf tag beside every facing it captures, then matches that item to its listing in the same banner's digital catalog. Across 1,046 matched observations in the current record, the two agree one percent of the time, and the in-store price is the cheaper of the two in eight cases out of ten. The gaps are not noise. They cluster: promotional tags that never reached the digital price, digital prices that drifted upward while the aisle held, multi-buy structures ("2 for $6") that translate to a different effective unit price than the storefront shows.
The spread runs both directions, and each direction has an owner. When the store is cheaper than the digital shelf, the retailer is quietly charging a delivery-context premium that rarely appears in any disclosure. When the screen is cheaper than the shelf, a promotion is leaking margin in one channel or failing to execute in the other. At one grocer in our record, a sparkling-water multipack carried a shelf price more than a dollar off its digital listing for the same week. That is the kind of gap that stays invisible unless someone measures both sides on the same day.
For brands, tag-versus-screen reconciliation is execution auditing: the promotion you funded either made it to the tag, to the screen, to both, or to neither, and the record says which. For allocators, systematic spread is a margin signal: persistent channel-pricing gaps at a retailer are a strategy, and strategies show up in gross margin eventually.
Scanner panels cannot see this at all: they record transactions, not the tags that produced them. The only way to know what a shelf said is to have been in front of it.