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I've never seen one that didn't, but she specifically said that there wasn't anybody around to do the price check which tells me she wasn't dealing with a cashier and the attendant had stepped away.
I have issues regularly with double scanning. Just last week I was at the drug store with about 20 items including two bottles of vitamins and they were on sale at buy one get one half off. Also a lot of other things were on sale and I had a couple of store coupons. The bill seemed higher than it should be so I politely questioned it. The very elderly and crabby cashier glanced at my receipt and said "look -- everything is fine -- you got the one for 50% off." So I walked out of the store and checked the receipt again outside and sure enough -- she charged me for one EXTRA bottle of vitamins at $15.99! So I went back inside and the manager was doing something near the cashier and he took over and said that YES -- she did overcharge me -- scanned the item twice. Then the cashier was sweet as pie in front of the manager. You really have to watch when they scan.
This has happened to me on and off at Target, Walmart etc. and it's frustrating as it consumes my time and effort to get corrected.
Today I bought some nectarines and it rung up as $2.98/lb when it was posted at $1.78/lb, I bought only 1lb so I was out a dollar.
I did notice it while ringing it up that it was high but there was nobody around to ask so I did not want to hold up the line since I did not recall the exact price (who does?). Later I verified that it was indeed the wrong price, so I tried to go to Customer Service but of course there is an insanely long line there so I am not going to stand in it to recover my dollar.
Frustrating, how do you avoid such stuff? Do you write down the prices? keep a mental note (not reasonable if you have a ton of items) or do you track the total (may be a better idea?).
My belief is that if there is a pricing error they should actually give you the item for free...
Back in the early days of barcode scanners, a number of supermarket chains did have a policy of "we guarantee the accuracy of our scaners — if an item scans at an incorrect price, we will give you that item for free." It was a trust-building exercise, and now that trust has largely been established, most stores have dropped this policy. I have yet to run across a store that won't refund the difference between the inaccurate and the correct price, however.
I usually take photos of the shelf tags with my cell phone when buying items on sale, for those are the items that I find scan at the wrong price most often. Also: usually, if you're going through a cashier line at a store, the place you go to dispute the price is not the cashier directly but customer service. I have yet to have this happen at a Walmart, so I haven't had to endure their usually long customer-service lines, but I will wait at my supermarket's customer service counter while the staff deal with the one or two people buying lottery tickets in front of me in order to get the error rectified. Taking a photo spares the customer service staff the need to go over to the aisle where the product is located to check the price tag.
I didn't do this with a regularly-priced bag of spinach at a new small-format supermarket here that has only self-checkouts. It also doesn't have a customer service desk. Instead, if you have an item that scans at an incorrect price, you alert one of the monitors at the self-checkouts, and they go over to check the price on the item. You then get refunded the difference.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Rabrrita
I'm one of those that have no issues with contacting my state regulators to report price error at checkout. When a merchant advertises a price for an item, I have every right to expect that item will be rung up correctly. I recognize I have a responsibility to check the pricing myself but when I find a mistake, the merchant should not expect anything less than a formal complaint to the State. I personally don't care who gets disciplined or fired over it.
That would be like escalating your trouble ticket with your laptop computer to the president of the company on the very first call. That's overkill. Stores are still run by people, and people make mistakes. So do the machines they produce and run. Feed the machine inaccurate data, you'll get an incorrect result. Point it out to the operator, and the operator can fix it. No need to get the regulators involved unless you can find a consistent, pervasive pattern of overcharging at the store.
I'm one of those that have no issues with contacting my state regulators to report price error at checkout. When a merchant advertises a price for an item, I have every right to expect that item will be rung up correctly. I recognize I have a responsibility to check the pricing myself but when I find a mistake, the merchant should not expect anything less than a formal complaint to the State. I personally don't care who gets disciplined or fired over it.
So do you overreact about everything?
This seriously might be the most ridiculous thing I've ever read, Karen.
I'm one of those that have no issues with contacting my state regulators to report price error at checkout. When a merchant advertises a price for an item, I have every right to expect that item will be rung up correctly. I recognize I have a responsibility to check the pricing myself but when I find a mistake, the merchant should not expect anything less than a formal complaint to the State. I personally don't care who gets disciplined or fired over it.
You've got to be joking. Millions of SKU's in a store and you're going to make a government report if one is wrong? What do you do? Go back and take photos of the item on the shelf so you have proof for the regulators? Why not just tell the store so they can fix it?
And buckle up, with prices rising on nearly every shipment of product that comes in, expect more errors as we dumb retailers try to keep up and make all the pricing changes.
You do realize what a massive undertaking that is? I work in a physically small store where we still have anywhere from twenty to a few hundred price changes each and every day that all have to be manually changed. I've been tasked with doing those price checks you talk about, and it takes weeks of nothing but scanning 8 hrs a day 5 days a week to verify my entire store, and in the meantime the price changes still drop every day. It's also true that the errors go both ways, sometimes in favor of the store, sometimes in favor of the customer. Until the process all goes electronic and people are taken out of the process there will always be errors in pricing. And that's what most of them are, human errors, not a deliberate effort to scam unwary customers.
I totally understand. And this reminds me of the days before everything was computerized, back in the late 70's during horrible inflation. We would get long printouts of price changes and we had to use price guns with the little stickers to change prices. I swear there would be cans with 8-10 stickers on them, prices were rising so fast. All store employees had to help with this.
At our store we always honor the lower price if the customer spots a mistake.
That would be like escalating your trouble ticket with your laptop computer to the president of the company on the very first call. That's overkill. Stores are still run by people, and people make mistakes. So do the machines they produce and run. Feed the machine inaccurate data, you'll get an incorrect result. Point it out to the operator, and the operator can fix it. No need to get the regulators involved unless you can find a consistent, pervasive pattern of overcharging at the store.
Our state regulators want consumers to report scanning accuracy violations. They don't take action on every complaint, but they do act when the pattern of violations go from errors to outright disregard. If I report a violation, they take the info. But if they get several other reports of that same item spread over several days, it's a clear indication that the retailer couldn't care less how they rip off the consumers. To most consumers, they think it's only them and that single item in their hand. To the regulators they are seeing multiple incidents over multiple time periods covering multiple products from a single location. That's not a human mistake, that's a store not caring how often, for how much and how many times they rip off an ignorant consumer.
Our state regulators want consumers to report scanning accuracy violations. They don't take action on every complaint, but they do act when the pattern of violations go from errors to outright disregard. If I report a violation, they take the info. But if they get several other reports of that same item spread over several days, it's a clear indication that the retailer couldn't care less how they rip off the consumers. To most consumers, they think it's only them and that single item in their hand. To the regulators they are seeing multiple incidents over multiple time periods covering multiple products from a single location. That's not a human mistake, that's a store not caring how often, for how much and how many times they rip off an ignorant consumer.
Maybe, maybe not. Are these 'concerned' consumers giving the manager the courtesy of making him/her aware that there is an error and giving him a chance to correct it? It's one thing to knowingly let an overprice ride, it's entirely another if the manager is entirely unaware that some of the price changes were handled incorrectly by employees. You can't fix what you don't know about.
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