4 ms·
Being in Scotland and poor to the point of trying to eat on a few pounds ($5) a week. I discovered (by watching another customer) that a certain kind of very e
by alasdair_ 4y ago
Being in Scotland and poor to the point of trying to eat on a few pounds ($5) a week.
I discovered (by watching another customer) that a certain kind of very expensive Scottish smoked salmon was 4 pence more expensive than the price listed on the shelf. The supermarket (Tesco) also has a large sign stating that if the price was wrong on any item, they would both give you the item for free and the money it costs.
I promptly went and loaded up a cart with nothing but smoked salmon.
It took 42 minutes of arguing with different store managers and pointing to the sign, but I managed to eat for free that week and even had enough to pay my electricity bill.
The reason I don’t feel bad is that particular store very, very often charged the customers more than the listed price and no one ever seemed to catch them.
I went in three months later, and the same salmon still rang up at 4p more than it was listed at.
- OJFord 4y agoThat's just the right combination of brilliant and bizarre. It used to (and might still be) the case that at Waitrose multibuy type offers are still honoured on reduced items, and applied by discount - based on the original price - meaning you could/can get a further reduction on yellow labels, or potentially be paid to take them.
- alhirzel 4y agoMy uncle was in a similar situation: bought a granola bar, price was wrong, free granola bar. He went back a few days later and the price was still wrong. He’s a lawyer, and he sued the store and won (false advertising or something) to get them to fix the price. Pretty awkward because it’s the closest store to his family’s house. His son said it best one day, “dad, are you bored at work?”
- copperwater69 4y ago
- bayouborne 4y ago"..He went back a few days later and the price was still wrong." I've occasionally wondered about this, as an entirely new class of crime. One where a motivated regional manager at a modern supermarket chain could get together with someone in the IT infrastructure and decide to tweak a number (a price) in a database, and carefully watch the uncontested sales vs requests for refunds ratio. These 'mistakes' could be happening all across the stores' offerings and no one, including most of the employees, would ever be the wiser.
- alhirzel 4y agoI've half-suspected that Harbor Freight does this. Doing the analytics could be a good business opportunity. I'm sure once the metadata companies (Amazon, Facebook) meet real retail (not just the high-dollar retail like Whole Foods), there will be interest in this measure of consumer's price awareness.
- jansan 4y agoI like those McDonald's hacks where people exploit flaws in the price calculations to get burgers for free. IIRC in one case they noticed that you could order a hamburger without patty, and it had a slightly negative price. So they ordered twenty hamburgers without patty and one normal hamburger, and got all free of charge.
- ThePowerOfFuet 4y ago> I went in three months later, and the same salmon still rang up at 4p more than it was listed at. Incredible.
- roryisok 4y agowas buying beer once for a party, and a crate of 12 pint bottles was ringing up for the price of a single bottle. so I bought 4 crates. we drank well that weekend