I was in Whole Foods the other day looking for some cough syrup, when I got to talking to the employee who works in the supplements section. After touching on the subject of the returnability of anything I didn’t like (news to me!), the conversation turned towards abuses of the system. The employee told me about a guy who regularly comes into the store and checks all the shelves and if he finds a sales label which has an expired date on it, he gets the item on the shelf for free. This employee claimed it was a law. I cannot find any information on the Internet about this “law”. I live in Chicago.
Has anyone ever heard of this? Might this be a grocery store policy or is it really a “law”? If it’s a law, is it a local, state, or federal one?
I’ve gotten things for free if they’re rung up incorrectly, but that’s different from the situation I described above.
Inane policies like this are always abused by people like that. It would make sense if perhaps it was one item but if the guy is a regular, there’s a problem.
I doubt that it’s Whole Foods where someone would buy 5 bottles of cologne (if it’s even sold there). I wouldn’t know as I don’t have one in my area. The sentiment is still the same.
A person like who would complain that they would get “ONLY” one item for free is simply infuriating. It’s a case of two wrongs not making a right. You’re definitely not owed countless returns for one mistake. A mistake was noted and corrected and that person is rewarded.
That’s the whole purpose of effective dates on ad signage. If it was an everyday price error, it would be sensible.
Can you tell I work retail?
To answer your question more directly,
It’s probably just a corporate policy as opposed to actual law. I’ve heard of issues with sales tax and similar things. It would make more sense that a law may relate to the item being sold at that price and no more.
A common exception to such laws or policies is alcohol and tobacco. In the stores I worked in NC, there was no way that I knew of scoring a free beer or pack of smokes. The store or authorities were just too uptight about possible scams being used for those products.
But even on regular items, I don’t remember a “Wrong price, free item” policy. Mostly, I remember nasty customers who didn’t like being told that the wrong price was on the shelf and that they’d have to pay the extra 14 cents.
Most supermarket around here will give you the item for free – and even give you a dollar – if the scanner price does not match the price tag on the shelves. It was an originally a come-on to get people willing to accept the fact that items no longer had individual price tags, but I don’t know of any store that has discontinued the policy.
You’re talking about “expired” products, right? It has nothing to do with the correct price on an item? I would imagine the store is not supposed to sell items that have expired. It would vary by manufacturer and distributor, but some items are thrown away if not sold by certain dates, giving them away is the same thing. I had a deal with my distributor on chips that if an item sat on the shelf long enough to expire he would replace it for free, but if I gave away an item I had to pay for it no matter the expiration date. I believed he would sell the expired items at a local flea market at huge discounts.
Australian anecdote (so no use for your situation at all, but an example for comparison): We have to honor whichever price is lower. No marking the item if the shelf price is higher than the scanned price, and we must mark the item down if the shelf price is lower.
There is a voluntary Scanning Code of Practice that most of the larger supermarket chains belong to, and as such they are required to give you an item for free if it scans wrong. If you are purchasing multiple items, you get the first one free and the rest at the lower price.
ETA:
I don’t think so. Sounds like their sales tags have an end date on them. We used to have special tags that went out on items that were on special. Under the price would be a line that said “Valid until 15.5.09” or whatever date the sale ended on.
If a store establishes a policy that if a customer finds an expired or mispriced item he can get it free, then it seems to me that he is doing the store a service by finding these incidents. And if so, there’s nothing wrong with him providing this service on a regular basis, if that’s what he wants to do. (Hey, the store isn’t doing what they ought to do, and he’s performing a valuable Quality Control service for them, and deserves to get paid for it. I am not being snarky or sarcastic.)
But I also think that it is reasonable for the store to put some sort of limit on this. One example of such a limit is that you only get one free, not all the ones in your cart. Or there can be a price limit. For example, I was once overcharged ten cents on an $18 item, and when I pointed it out to them, I got it free. A while later they changed their policy, so that if an item is over $10, the customer gets it with a $10 discount, but not entirely free, and I think that is reasonable.
On the other hand, the store has responsibilities too. There have been cases where I found a mispricing, and the corrected it for me, but not for other customers – three days later the item was still mispriced, and other customers were still getting cheated. That’s wrong.
No, the OP is referring to the expired sale price. For example, the regular price might be $15.99, but it’s on sale for $12.99 until May 5, 2009. The shelf is clearly marked with the sale price, usually like “[del]$15.99[/del] $12.99 until May 5!”
Around here, most registers have a sign that say in the event of a price discrepancy with the scanner, the customer will get the price advertised on the shelf. So on May 10, if the shelf still has the sale sticker, the customer still gets the sale price even though the sale ended five days earlier. Not free though.
The government of Quebec agrees with you and that store. Here, if a merchant overcharges you for an item that costs less than $10, the merchant must give it to you for free. Otherwise, you get a $10 discount. For example, I was once overcharged by ten cents on a bottle of wine. (The price on the tag was lower than the one indicated by the scanner at the cash register.) The clerk and I noticed it on the bill and he immediately reimbursed me $10.
Me neither. I’ve only ever seen the practice whereby the customer gets whichever prices is lowest, whether it was the ticket price, the scanned price, or the label on the shelf. You get the best price, but I’ve never seen it free.
I was behind a lady whose item didn’t scan correctly the other day. It took a couple of minutes to determine the problem and for the clerk to fill in a little form. The lady got the item for free ( she was surprised to discover) but I was thinking that the rest of us in line should get something for free as well because of the additional wait.
Most of the supermarkets around here (NY-NJ) have this policy. I’ve heard that (unlike Canada, thanks for those posts!) the laws in the US only require the store to give you the product at the lower price, not free. But I think it is a good policy for the stores to have, and it would be wonderful if the US would mandate it as Canada has done.
To me the logic is simple: If they only have to give you the lower price, then there is no incentive for the store to label the items accurately. They can have low prices on the shelf, high prices at the register, and the store will profit nicely, except for the very few individuals who notice the difference. But if they have to give it to you for free, then they will actually LOSE money when an eagle-eye catches it. This loss can offset many other sales, and the store very much wants to avoid this. So it is an incentive for them to have accurate prices on the shelf, and it gives the customer confidence that this is so.
The Whole Foods employee told me the store has gotten extra vigilant about removing sales prices from the shelves.
What caught my attention was the employee’s statement that the customer got something for free just for noticing an out-of-date sales tag. Now that I think about it a little, it’s probably more likely that the customer knew the scanned price would be different than the out-of-date sales price, and therefore he took the item to the register and got it for free when it scanned wrong.
After seeing those newsmagazine programs on tv where they show grocery stores charging the wrong amount, I am always vigilant. There was a time when I consistently got a favorite expensive juice item free because it was mispriced for several months at the local big chain grocery store. I didn’t know that “expired” sales labels counted for beans though. If it says the sale ended yesterday and I’m there today, why should I expect the sales price to still be valid?
Our local big-chain grocery stores (Dominick’s, Jewel) used to have a policy posted prominently at the register about getting an item free if it scanned differently than advertised. I haven’t seen this policy posted anywhere lately though. Anyone know if this an industry standard in the U.S.?
There are a couple of large grocery chains out here in CA that had such a horrid history of price mis-matching that they are under a Court order to provide you with one of that product for free.
Thus, some other stores may do this semi-voluntarily out of fear of such an order.