Convenience stores fail price checks more than any other retail category
A February inspection at a 7-Eleven in Casa Grande, Arizona found that 12 of 25 items rang up higher at the register than the prices posted on the shelf — a 48% error rate on that single visit. A “mega pack” of Wrigley’s watermelon gum priced at $3.99 on the shelf came up as $4.99 at the register; a KitKat bar carried a 40-cent bump; and dill-flavored Pickle Bites cost 10 cents more than the shelf tag indicated.
Those findings match a pattern that recurs across the country, according to the Guardian’s review of state inspection records. Between 2023 and 2025, Circle K locations failed 35% of their government price-accuracy inspections in Florida, 62% in North Carolina and 82% in Columbus, Ohio. Over the same period, 7-Eleven flunked 47% of inspections in both Colorado and Utah and 79% in Ontario county in upstate New York. In Arizona, Circle K failed 39% of its 739 inspections and 7-Eleven failed 41% of its 151 inspections during the same period, according to Mike Brooks, program administrator for the state’s office of weights and measures. In Los Angeles county, which the Guardian estimates is home to roughly 15% of all U.S. 7-Eleven stores, the chain failed 335 of 909 inspections — a 37% failure rate.
California inspectors documented the worst single-day rates the Guardian obtained. A Wednesday 2024 inspection at a 7-Eleven in Huntington Park found a 67% overcharge rate, and the next day an inspector recorded a 50% overcharge rate at a location in North Hollywood, 19 miles away. A Pomona 7-Eleven failed four times, including a 2025 inspection in which 5 of 13 items rang up higher than their shelf prices — an energy drink listed at $1 with a rewards card came up as $3.49 at the register, a tropical fruit-flavored snack priced at $1 rang up at $2.89, and a $2.29 Hershey’s Mr Goodbar came up as $3.49.
In July, a Guardian reporter visited 10 7-Eleven stores in Los Angeles county that had previously failed inspections, including the North Hollywood and Pomona locations. The reporter bought batches of 10 items at each of the 10 locations, and half of those tests produced overcharges. At the Pomona store, a two-for-$5 discount on Quest protein chips was not honored; an employee said a phone number was needed to apply the discount, even though that was not specified on the sticker price. At the North Hollywood location, five items were overcharged. At a 7-Eleven in Highland Park, a manager blamed a night shift worker for not updating shelf prices. Workers at all five stores that overcharged the reporter acknowledged that the sticker prices were out of date and said employees could not always keep up with updating thousands of individual items’ prices. “It’s not about overcharging or something like that,” an employee at the North Hollywood 7-Eleven said, asking that he not be named out of fear of getting in trouble with management. He said workers are already expected to run registers, clean stores, manage deliveries and stock shelves, and that it sometimes takes the store two weeks to update stickers after the company issues new prices.
Miland Kofford, the weights and measures project manager for Utah’s department of agriculture and food, said many overcharges originate with vendors rather than store employees. A harried Coca-Cola or Frito-Lay delivery worker might stock products and attach vendor-generated sale tags, then fail to update them on later visits, Kofford said. Stores are often too understaffed to catch those errors. But, he added, “the store is still responsible, regardless of who put the price up.”
The pricing problem extends to fuel pumps. Convenience stores sell roughly 80% of the gasoline purchased in the U.S., according to industry data, and government price-accuracy inspections of retail stores typically cover in-store items rather than gasoline. As fuel prices have surged — hitting an all-time Labor Day record of $4.15 a gallon for regular gas this month — car and truck owners do not take inaccurate price listings lightly.
In March, Rachel Hays, a 50-year-old veterinarian and single mother who lives on a ranch east of Austin, Texas, stopped at a 7-Eleven near her home after noticing its large sign advertising diesel at $4.199 a gallon. “I was so happy because I was like, ‘$4.19, that’s a great price,’” Hays said. She planned to fill her Ford truck’s 34-gallon tank but noticed the price on the pump read $4.499 — a 30-cent gap. “The lone employee in the store made no attempt to change the price on the sign,” Hays wrote in a complaint to state authorities. “This has happened multiple times at this particular gas station.” Driving by the following day, Hays saw that the prices still had not been aligned. “I pay a lot of attention,” she said in a June interview. “I mean, it costs me 150 bucks to fill up my truck.”
On a Monday evening in August 2024, Alexander Stout, a 43-year-old retired military reservist who lives with five dogs on a six-acre ranch in Somerset, Texas, pulled his Dodge truck into his local 7-Eleven. He had spotted a roadside sign touting regular fuel at $2.859 a gallon. In an email to the state’s department of licensing and regulation, Stout explained that the pump read $2.999. He offered to share a video of the 14-cent disparity with the agency. “This gas station has done this before,” Stout wrote.
Three months later, Stout received an email informing him that the case had been closed for “insufficient evidence.” An agency attorney said he had tried to contact Stout and indicated that, having performed an on-site inspection and determined the marquee had not been “operational,” he “did not feel it was warranted to move forward to a penalty.”
“This closing letter is a joke,” Stout wrote back. “Imagine my frustration to do something right and this is how investigations are handled. I’m pissed about this because you keep screwing people over. Fourteen cents doesn’t seem like a lot, but for somebody who’s already hurting, that 14 cents could add up to a meal their kids miss.”
During a June visit to the Somerset 7-Eleven where Stout spotted the overcharge, a Guardian reporter brought two 14-ounce bottles of 7-Select cold-pressed juice advertised on the shelf at “2 for $6” to the counter only to have them ring up at $7.78. Presented with the discrepancy, the cashier counted out a $1.78 refund, suggesting that the sale had probably ended but “we just haven’t removed the sign yet.” The fine print on the sign indicated that the offer was valid for another three weeks.
In several complaints, consumers accused the stores of using false gas prices as a way to lure shoppers inside; more than half of customers who stop for gas go inside to make purchases, according to the industry’s trade association.
In North Carolina last year, state inspector Tripp Foltz responded to a complaint that the pump price at a Circle K in Hillsborough was significantly higher than the road-facing sign — $3.799 at the pump versus $3.459 advertised. After Foltz explained the situation to the manager, she corrected the sign. But on two subsequent return visits over the next couple of weeks, Foltz documented 14-cent and 24-cent overcharges, and the agency imposed a $500 penalty. Weeks later, another consumer complaint prompted a return visit — and another 14-cent overcharge.
Because of limited staffing, North Carolina only inspects in-store pricing at convenience stores when it receives complaints. Of the 28 failed Circle K inspections between 2023 and 2025, 16 were follow-ups from previous failures; one store in Kernersville failed five times in a row.
Marco Cruz, a 29-year-old who lives in Casa Grande, told the Guardian that similar pricing issues had become a regular annoyance. In six months, Cruz said, he had run into similar problems at convenience stores at least five times. Earlier the same day in November 2025, he tried to buy two bottles of water at a Circle K in McAllen, Texas, after seeing an in-store promotion offering a free energy drink with any such purchase; at the register, the manager told him the offer was no longer valid. Later that night, at the same store, Cruz picked up a pack of beef and jalapeño cheese sticks priced at $3.99 on the shelf that rang up at $4.19. When he asked the cashier to honor the shelf price, the employee refused and threatened to call the police when Cruz grew more insistent, according to Cruz. “All I’m asking you is honor the price,” Cruz told the attendant before leaving the store and later filing a complaint with the Texas attorney general. “We expect to pay what we see on the shelf,” Cruz said, “even if that already doesn’t seem like a good deal.”
“These places count on distracted, hurried, desperate customers who are already in line to pay whatever prices are presented at the register,” wrote Joe Lunsford, a 7-Eleven shopper in Virginia, in a complaint to his state’s attorney general. “The operators and clerks make it seem like you are out of place to challenge a price off by pennies, and I agree I felt a little ridiculous, but these small ‘pricing errors’ add up in their favor at the end of the day and harm consumers.”
Convenience stores are the worst-performing U.S. retail category for price accuracy, according to a 2024 report by the National Council on Weights and Measures, which found convenience stores failed 34% of price-accuracy inspections by regulators in 26 states — higher than dollar stores (29%) or auto parts stores (27%). As much as 57% of the U.S. population shops at convenience stores at least once a week, according to a 2025 study by the National Association of Convenience Stores.
7-Eleven and Circle K compete in the “low-income tier,” according to a 2026 report by the market research company Morning Consult. The Circle K brand, in particular, comes to mind quickly for shoppers earning less than $50,000 a year, but not for consumers earning $100,000 or more. A finance staffer for a Circle K vendor in Ohio told the Guardian, speaking on the condition that her name not be used, that pricing disparities at her local Circle K had become the norm: “They would have old sale tickets up that said two for $5 and then the promotion had ended,” she said. “I saw it on the candy. I saw it on energy drinks. Everything was just consistently mislabeled.” When she stops for gas at her local Circle K, she often lets her seven-year-old go inside to pick out a treat. She added: “Convenience stores are often used by a lot of shift workers, blue-collar workers, seniors and people that have limited transportation options. The people who can least afford being overcharged are the ones paying the price.”
The Guardian examined 153 consumer complaints alleging overcharges at Circle K and 7-Eleven stores across 17 states. Nearly half focused on overcharges on purchases of candy, food, drinks and other items within the stores; the rest cited overcharges on gasoline, reporting that stores displayed lower prices on their big outdoor signs than what was being charged at the pumps. Many shoppers’ complaints accuse the two chains of deceptive business practices and “bait-and-switch” pricing tactics, describing in-store promotions for nonexistent sales and employees who shrugged off overcharges.
The overcharging pattern extends beyond convenience stores. Americans get soaked by add-on costs built into a wide range of transactions — “junk fees” tacked on to apartment rents and big-league baseball tickets, hidden charges on auto sales and home loans — as well as overcharges at brand-name chains across the bricks-and-mortar retail sector, according to court claims, government reports and interviews with consumers cited by the Guardian. Customers frequently pay more at checkout than what shelf tags promise not only at convenience stores but also at chain supermarkets, big-box stores, drug stores and hardware stores. In December, the Guardian reported that Dollar General, the nation’s largest dollar-store chain, continued to overcharge customers after paying millions of dollars in penalties to officials in multiple states; in Wisconsin, the chain failed 31% of its price inspections in the 23 months after an $850,000 settlement with the state.
Repeat pricing violations are common across retail categories, and even wide-ranging investigations and millions of dollars in fines often do not stop big companies from charging customers more than their posted prices, the Guardian found. In 2021, state and local prosecutors in California informed Carquest Auto Parts that their investigation had found the chain’s stores across the state were routinely overcharging customers. Despite the warning, the problem got worse, authorities claimed in a lawsuit. At one point, the suit said, Carquest stores flunked 39 of 43 price inspections across 20 counties, overcharging on 23% of the items pulled by inspectors. The chain paid $750,000 in 2024 to settle the case.
In another example, Walmart agreed to stop overcharging customers in a 2008 settlement with California officials, then paid $2.1 million in 2012 to settle claims that it had violated that deal by continuing to ring up higher-than-posted prices at checkout. In August 2025, it agreed to pay state authorities another $5.6 million to address claims it had once again overcharged customers at checkout, as well as selling produce and other groceries with less weight than promised on the label. Carquest and Walmart did not reply to questions from the Guardian about these settlements.
Both 7-Eleven and Circle K declined interview requests and did not answer detailed lists of questions from the Guardian. “Delivering value and maintaining trust amongst our customers is a top priority and we take pricing accuracy very seriously,” a 7-Eleven spokesperson said. In a separate statement, the company said: “There are on average more than 3,000 products per store, and prices are adjusted as needed based on a number of external factors including manufacturer and distributor cost changes. When a discrepancy is identified, we have processes in place to correct it promptly, and we continue to invest in technology and operational improvements to help ensure accurate pricing in stores.” A Circle K spokesperson said the company is “committed to complying with all applicable laws and regulations” and described its mission as “to make our customers’ lives a little easier every day, so their satisfaction is a top priority.” In a separate statement, Circle K acknowledged that “pricing discrepancies can sometimes occur between shelf labels and point-of-sale systems, resulting in either an undercharge or overcharge at the register.”
7-Eleven, based in Irving, Texas, operates more than 12,000 stores across the country. With origins dating to 1927, when a group of Dallas icehouse companies merged and began selling food and beverages, the company changed its name in 1946 to reflect its extended hours — from 7 a.m. to 11 p.m., seven days a week. Now owned by Tokyo-based Seven & i Holdings Co., Ltd., 7-Eleven was the first convenience-store chain to sell gas and to offer coffee in to-go cups. Circle K, the nation’s second-largest convenience-store chain, with roughly 7,300 outlets in 48 states, also has roots in Texas. In 1951, an El Paso-based entrepreneur named Fred Hervey bought three Kay’s Food Stores in that city and rechristened them “Circle K” stores before rolling them out across the south-west. Circle K is now owned by Quebec-based Alimentation Couche-Tard. Like 7-Eleven, it oversees a mix of company-operated locations and franchises.
Most state regulators prioritize grocery and big-box stores over convenience stores, the Guardian found, and several states — including Illinois, South Carolina and Wyoming — perform no retail price-accuracy inspections at all. Texas, home to an estimated 16,500 convenience stores — more than any other state — rarely inspects them; the state’s agriculture department conducted just 32 inspections at 7-Eleven and Circle K locations between 2023 and 2025, despite 51 price-disparity complaints filed by consumers during the same period. Texas officials did not respond to the Guardian’s requests for comment. But even regulators in states that do inspect convenience stores say their resources are limited. Brooks, the Arizona official, oversees 14 inspectors responsible for every retail outlet across the state’s 114,000 square miles. “We have very few bodies to check a whole lot of stuff,” Brooks said. “So we do the best we can.”
David Friedman, a legal scholar at Oregon’s Willamette University who has written extensively about deceptive pricing in the American marketplace, said major retailers have no excuse for charging customers more than the prices they advertise, especially given how advanced their inventory management tools have become. “It strains credibility for them to say, ‘Well, we’ve invested in all these sophisticated systems,’” but they are “not really capable” of ensuring that all prices are correct, he said.
Friedman said meaningful progress would require coordinated enforcement. “There are a lot of people who get speeding tickets and the next day they’re speeding again,” he said. “Unless you have the Federal Trade Commission or state attorneys general stepping in aggressively and repeatedly as a strategy and saying, ‘We are going to litigate against all of the retailers that do this, and we’re going to do it on a broad scale,’ the practices are going to continue.”