When you go to the grocery store, do you believe all the labels you see? According to social media influencer Jimmy Wrigg, you shouldn’t.
He joined WBBM Newsradio’s Rob Hart this week to discuss his grassroots effort to expose over-priced food at grocery stores.
“I found one item, and then after I found the one item I kept checking,” Wrigg told Hart. “I started at Walmart and I just kept finding them over and over, and I started making videos of it.”
In one video pinned on his TikTok page, Wrigg picks up several packages of ham from the brand Kentucky Legend at Walmart that he believed were labelled as being heavier than they really were. Then, he headed to the store’s own scale in the produce section and used his own 2-pound weight from a sporting goods store to test the scale, finding that it measured the weight as being 2.02 pounds.
On the scale, one package that was labelled as nearly 5 pounds measured under 2 pounds. Another labelled as more than 5 pounds came in at just 2.32 pounds. Every package Wrigg weighed was off by more than a pound compared it their labels.
“Found a couple hundred dollars over priced meat in 60 seconds,” he said.
In another video, a manager at Walmart can be seen telling Wrigg that Walmart itself doesn’t weigh the meat. The manager also said that the store doesn’t have a way to re-weigh the items and that it might donate it.
Wrigg has also weighed items at other retailers, such as Kroger.
When Hart asked what type of response Wrigg has been getting from the stores, the influencer said that they have mostly been correcting the incorrect prices. In the comments section of his videos, people share their own label-checking finds.
“Basically, what we’re doing is… I’m using social media as a weapon,” Wrigg explained. “We have 450,000, what they call followers on social media, but members, as it is. I go ahead and make the videos the members are the other half of it.”
His followers like and share the videos, contact stores and weigh items themselves. Wrigg said this group can now put pressure on companies to have more accurate labels.
