4 ms·

“In one court case in Ohio, Dollar General’s lawyers argued that “it is virtually impossible for a retailer to match shelf pricing and scanned pricing 100% of t

• tokai 10mo ago
  Just make the sticker price legally binding and this issue would be solved with almost perfect precision.
  • mindslight 10mo ago
    The sticker price is legally binding - it constitutes an offer, and the cash register surreptitiously charging a higher price from what the customer has agreed to constitutes fraud. The problem is that asserting your rights takes time, resources, and energy that people shopping at these stores generally do not have. The people that would have the ability to push back instead just use their resources to move on and shop somewhere else that isn't immediately abusing them.
    • gucci-on-fleek 10mo ago
      > The sticker price is legally binding, as it constitutes an offer While I wish that that were how things worked, unfortunately, the US legal system disagrees [0]. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invitation_to_treat#Case_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invitation_to_treat#Case_law
      • dymk 10mo ago
        That’s about ads, not sticker price on the shelf, and about a lack of obligation to sell at that price. It does not say that it’s alright to lie and charge a different price at the register.
        • gucci-on-fleek 10mo ago
          From the Wikipedia article: > A display of goods for sale in a shop window or within a shop is an invitation to treat, as in the Boots case, a leading case concerning supermarkets. The shop owner is thus not obliged to sell the goods, even if signage such as "special offer" accompanies the display. […] If a shop mistakenly displays an item for sale at a very low price it is not obliged to sell it for that amount.
          • faidit 10mo ago
            Boots was a UK court case. The Wikipedia article you linked has a note at the top that it mainly refers to British law. In the US, local laws generally side with the consumer and legally entitle you to the displayed price. There are also federal laws from the FTC act against deceptive pricing. See some US state laws here: https://www.nist.gov/pml/owm/us-retail-pricing-laws-and-regulations-state https://www.nist.gov/pml/owm/us-retail-pricing-laws-and-regu... a few summaries from https://www.braincorp.com/resources/the-price-must-be-right-your-guide-to-legal-price-compliance-in-retail https://www.braincorp.com/resources/the-price-must-be-right-...: >Michigan requires a bonus of 10 times the overcharge amount. New Jersey’s Retail Pricing Laws mandate that most retail stores clearly mark the total selling price on most items offered for sale. Retailers must also verify the accuracy of their checkout scanners and may face fines of $50-$100 per violation for noncompliance. Connecticut law requires stores to charge the lowest of the advertised, posted, or labeled price for an item. Customers who are overcharged are entitled to a refund of the overcharge or $20, whichever is greater
            • gucci-on-fleek 10mo ago
              Ah, you indeed appear to be correct. Sorry for the mistake, and thanks for the correction.
    • rtp4me 10mo ago
      "The people that would have the ability to push back"... And they can. Just bring it up to the cashier or managers attention, and voila, they adjust the price. Please let me know if you have had a different experience.
      • mindslight 10mo ago
        There's no "just". It takes resources to be scanning your receipt for discrepancies and/or running your own tally. And there are a few examples in the article referencing stores refusing to adjust prices, or of people noticing on their receipt that they were defrauded and the store refusing to reimburse them.
        • rtp4me 10mo ago
          Resources to read the receipt? Are you saying poor people can't do math? Honestly, how much effort does it take to look at your receipt and look for errors? If you are really on a tight budget, I guarantee you will be looking over your receipt. I have watched countless people shop with a calculator or pen/pad to make sure they stay on budget. It is not hard.
          • faidit 10mo ago
            The hard part is talking to the cashier and waiting for a manager, potentially having to argue with both, and looking like a cheapskate. If you've ever shopped at dollar stores they are often understaffed with a long line, no self-checkout, and a single cashier on duty if at all. If you argue about pricing you will hold everyone up in line, maybe get dirty looks and possibly wait an hour for someone with the authority to come and clear it up. Another person in this thread also mentioned that they got screamed at and chased out of the store for "causing a problem": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46182451 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46182451
            • rtp4me 10mo ago
              I have been to the Dollar Store (and similar) many times and have never witnessed anyone getting yelled at for saying, "Hey, I think this was a mistake. Can you correct it, please?" (or any other place I shop - especially the grocery stores). We tend to have very positive experiences when pointing out pricing errors. My mother-in-law made it a point to review the receipts ever time we went to the grocery store. No big deal. As other have said, sometimes you get +10% of your money back and other times you get it for free. Yes, mistakes happen; yes, people get over charged. But to imply people are shamed for asking to correct the error just seems...odd.
• xrd 10mo ago
  Dollar General: "people these days just don't want to work (meaning, my clients don't want to do that work or pay lazy genZers...)!"
• jrmg 10mo ago
  It’s virtually impossible for them because they’re not considering hiring more people to do it. Dollar General stores often run with one overworked staff member doing everything in the store, from stocking to working the register (which is why the register is unstaffed so much and you have roam the store to find someone to ring you up…)
  • nkrisc 10mo ago
    “Because of conditions of our own making, it is virtually impossible to comply with the law, thus we shouldn’t be held accountable to it.” It’s the same BS when Meta and others say they can’t moderate posts because there’s too many.
• jlund-molfese 10mo ago
  I used to work at Best Buy replacing pricing stickers before the store opened. We had a sheet of new stickers for changed prices every time and had to scan every sticker in the store to make sure they were all up to date. It makes sense they’re all switching to e-ink tags though, probably saves a ton in labor and the occasional mistake.
  • spwa4 10mo ago
    That's because those stickers constitute an offer of sale for a given price. If a customer comes in, takes the item, throws down the cash to an employee and leaves, that's a 100% bone fide legal sale. That's also why messing with price stickers is a crime.
• terminalshort 10mo ago
  An easy test for this is how often the price at the register is higher vs lower than the marked price. If it's close to 50%, then ok, it's a mistake. But if it's higher...
  • Spivak 10mo ago
    I don't think you would reasonably expect it to be close to 50/50. Most price changes are increases and the mistake theory basically boils down to the employees never updating the shelf tags. Which I think is an extremely plausible theory since the one employee at the store isn't paid enough to bother. And who's even going to check that they updated the tags? Dollar General isn't shelling out money for that. There's another kind of store that's in a similar situation: thrift stores and nearly all of them have also decided this problem is too hard. Lots of items are marked with just colors based roughly around their estimated value and the store changes the price/color mapping occasionally.
    • terminalshort 10mo ago
      When we are in an environment of 3% annual inflation the day to day price movements will overwhelm the drift of inflation and be basically random in terms of increases vs decreases.
• adolph 10mo ago
  > When on earth did we get into a world where that absolutely fundamental most basic task is now too burdensome to do with accuracy? It always has been this way since barcoded stock keeping units because of the problems identified by CAP Theorem [0]. Since the price data of an object must exist in two locations, shelf and checkout, the data is partitioned. It is also relatively expensive to update the shelf price since it depends on physical changes made by an unreliable human. Even if all stores used electronic price tags there will a very small lag, or a period in which prices are unavailable (or a period of unavailability like an overnight closure). It would be interesting to understand at what point of shelf/checkout accuracy would lead to what increases in overall prices [1]. That is to say that pricing information has a cost: a buyer must bring the item to checkout to find out the true cost in the case of authoritative checkout, or the clerk must walk to each shelf in the case of authoritative shelf. Once upon a time, each item in the store was labeled with a price tag and the clerk typed that tag into a tabulation device in order to calculate tax and total. The advent of the bar code lead to shelf label pricing since the clerk needn't read a price from each item, leading to the CAP Theory problem of today. I suppose that the future will bring back something similar to individual price tags in the form of individual RFID pricing. This way each individual item on a shelf can be priced in a way that is readable by the buyer and the seller in the same manner. 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAP_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAP_theorem 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_efficiency https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_efficiency