This story was produced in conjunction with the NYCity News Service and with the support of the Equity Through Data Project at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY.
Every time you grab a salad, fruit or steak from a New York City grocery or supermarket, you’re putting your trust in a scale.
Some merchants are sorely testing that trust: City inspectors found hundreds of broken or miscalibrated food scales at groceries and supermarkets between 2023 and 2025, a NYCity News Service analysis of records found. Among the violators were Gristedes, Westside Market and Whole Foods stores.
Faulty scales could lead to overcharging customers, hitting New Yorkers where it hurts amid rising food prices and threats to SNAP benefits. City inspection reports don’t specify whether scales are over- or underestimating the weight of food, but some shoppers are almost certainly paying more than they should.
And despite a wave of recent inspector hires that boosted the ranks to 62 — among them, 34 whose duties include scale inspections — city officials say they currently cannot check every scale annually as required, due to the sheer number of businesses that use the devices.
The NYCity News Service’s analysis of inspection data found that, between 2023 and 2025, DCWP inspectors visited more than 4,000 grocery stores. Nearly a quarter of groceries were cited for at least one violation and inspectors confiscated 100 scales.
In supermarkets, the numbers were even worse: 36% of nearly 1,000 inspected received scale violations. Fifty-seven supermarkets had at least one scale confiscated, while DCWP logged 300 related customer complaints. In total, 11% of inspected scales were marked as “condemned,” requiring the business to fix or replace them before putting them back into service.
The agency classifies grocers differently than supermarkets. Supermarkets are larger and have additional requirements, such as pricing each individual item and providing scanners throughout the store for customer price-checking.
“DCWP is continually engaging and assessing our enforcement efforts to ensure that New Yorkers have a fair and affordable marketplace,” a department spokesperson said on Monday. “We are committed to ensuring that the big businesses and corporations that rip New Yorkers off are held accountable for their actions.”
Big Chains Among the Violators
Cases of broken or miscalibrated scales rarely make headlines. One exception: In 2015, when the city accused Whole Foods of overcharging customers across New York, leading the chain to settle the case for $500,000.
The crux of the allegations: Whole Foods was charging shoppers for groceries that they were not getting – a label may say the package had two pounds of chicken, but the actual weight of the meat was less.
Fifty inspections in the last two and a half years turned up eight violations across Whole Foods’ 21 city locations, the NYCity News Service’s analysis shows. Fifteen customer complaints were filed, most citing broken or inaccurate scales. No scales were confiscated.
Whole Foods’ regional office declined multiple requests for comment.
In the past two years, inspectors confiscated five scales at a First Avenue Gristedes location and issued violations to several others.
Representatives for Gristedes, the Midtown-based supermarket chain owned by Namdor Inc., which also operates D’Agostino’s, declined to comment.
Then there is Westside Market, the family-owned chain with seven locations across Manhattan. Known for its extensive prepared food offerings, Westside Market faced six scale-related violations in the last two years, ranging from inaccurate labeling to failing to provide a customer-use scale. Ten customer complaints were filed, including claims of overcharges and insufficient price posting, some of which could be scale-related.
An in-person check by a NYCity News Service reporter at Westside Market’s 77 Seventh Ave. location last summer found that three of the nine sale-by-weight items, including dried broccoli and chocolate, tested did not match their scale weights.
Even checking the weights was difficult. When asked, employees were unaware of requirements that a scale needs to be nearby for customers. That scale turned out to be tucked in the produce section — unmarked and over 30 feet from the store-packed goods, as regulations require.
Westside Market officials did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Inspection Challenges
Since New York passed a landmark consumer protection law in 1969, the city’s Department of Weights and Measures has worked mostly out of public view to protect shoppers from unfair practices. Inspectors regularly check deli and supermarket scales to ensure that customers are charged fair prices, and enforce the city’s customer rights-at-the-register policies.
Scales must be registered and inspected by the city’s Department of Consumer and Worker Protection (DCWP) within three months of a supermarket opening. Then the scales are supposed to be checked annually. Additional inspections may happen when customers complain to DCWP about the measuring devices, though the agency says there is no strict threshold for the number of complaints that trigger an inspection.
In addition, every grocery store that sells food by weight — whether in prepackaged containers, deli counters or bulk bins — must provide a National Institute of Standards and Technology–approved scale for customers to re-weigh store-packaged food.
“In New York State, our employees follow the NIST handbook — that’s our bible,” said James Willis, director of the state’s Bureau of Weights and Measures. “With the sheer number of weights and measures devices across the state, we need a streamlined system for inspecting and regulating all of these different devices.”
In an interview last fall, DCWP Deputy Commissioner James Hurst said the agency relies on business owners to alert them when they have a new scale. After the agency recently hired additional inspectors, Hurst said the agency expects to have inspected all food scales in the city by June 2026.
In the last two years alone, DCWP issued 80,714 violations to food retailers for various violations, including those beyond faulty scales. These range from not properly displaying sell-by dates to not having scales nearby for shoppers to check the weight on pre-packaged food. Roughly 17,000 cases are pending, but of those closed, the businesses were determined guilty 72% of the time.
Cases are issued by the DCWP’s Enforcement division and adjudicated by the city’s Office of Administrative Trials and Hearings. Fines can range from $50 for simple food label violations to $10,000 for multiple, intentional scale-related offenses.
“I Don’t Understand Why“
For shoppers already struggling with high grocery prices, overcharges caused by faulty scales can add up fast. What may seem like pennies per item can become dollars per trip and millions of extra dollars spent by unsuspecting shoppers across the city.
Donna Ellenberg, a regular shopper at Westside Market’s Upper East Side location, said she saw the store’s hot bar prices jump from $7.99 per pound to $10.99 per pound overnight while the container size for these foods shrank. She also noticed employees going down the aisles, increasing the price of stocked items on the shelves, estimating that the prices on these products went up about 25% to 30%.
Ellenberg said she witnessed Westside Market’s price changes happen one day after the Trump administration announced it would not extend the deadline on global tariffs scheduled to go into effect until 10 days later. Westside Market declined to comment on price increases.
Items weighed on employee-use deli scales showed inconsistent readings, with scales displaying different weights than listed on packaging. One deli scale was unable to return to zero when food was removed.
“Three dollars more and one-third less product means a major price increase for me, and I don’t understand why,” she said.
