Right - a promotion in which the seller does nothing to indicate a promotion until you commit to buy.
No signs, no ads, just the pumps are off.
Surrrreee it’s a promotion…
If the clerk has been told then you’ve done what is required. Buy the item at the discounted price and enjoy it. I would do the same thing.
First, need to get this out of the way: I AM NOT A LAWYER, or in any way qualified to give legal advice. I am offering a layman’s opinion.
As I understand it, you are under no legal requirement to point out an error to the clerk. So if you bring a $50 coffee maker to the counter, and the register rings it up at $3, you are not legally required to say, “No, that’s supposed to be $50.” You are allowed to defer to the clerk’s opinion.
Now, as somebody pointed out in the quote of “theft by deception” in Washington, if you try to convince the clerk that it really should be $3, that gets questionable. If you knew $3 was wrong, that’s a crime (But how easy to prove would that be? Remember you are allowed to be stupid.)
If you did something to cause it to ring up wrong, like put a wrong upc code on a sticker on it, that’s a crime. If you were working together with someone else who did that, still a crime and now conspiracy to boot. But if you just found the product mis-marked and brought it to the register, bonus for you.
Which is why store stickers and shelf tags now include the name of the product. “But the sign said 2 for $1”. “Yes, but it also says the 4oz size, which this isn’t.”
In the original case, with the gas:
Yes, places sometimes do unadvertised promotions, “as a reward for our loyal customers.” Or perhaps you just didn’t see the advertisement, as it only appeared in the local paper, or on the station’s Facebook page or something. So it is going to be very hard to prove that these people knew they were getting a discount they weren’t supposed to. (I know of several radio stations that would do a promotion of impossibly cheap gas for roughly an hour-and-a-half to encourage people to listen, as the only announcement was on the air. I might well think I had stumbled into one of those.)
That everybody chose to pay at the pump suggests they were trying to not bring the price to the attention of the cashier, but I doubt that could be proven in court.
Isn’t that just what happens at Black Friday? People even camp out overnight on the sidewalk to be in the front of the line. And the stores spend lots of money encouraging this. So how is it unethical?
Given that the clerk sees the price when they ring up the product at the register, what else would I need to tell them?
Let me flip this around.
A couple months ago we got vastly overcharged on an item in the grocery store. We were buying some pricier things for the holidays so it didn’t stand out at first. We checked when we got home and wow! That was an expensive head of cauliflower.
We went back and got a refund.
OTOH, what if we considered it theft? Could we have reported it to the police, had a criminal case made against the store? I don’t think so.
Note that the third option was to do nothing. Let it slide.
So I think the same applies going the other way. No criminal complaint would go very far.
(I seem to recall a news item several years ago where a guy bought a truck from a dealer. The dealer later decided that the price was too low, filed a complaint, maybe got the truck towed or some such. Anyone remember this better and how it ended?)
Black Friday is obviously intended to encourage shoppers by offering select low price merchandise, so that the store can make a profit. Gas Stations only sell gas, and when you’re selling gas at 99.7% discount there’s no conceivable way to make a profit. Fuck, the guy has to pay 20 cents a gallon in tax alone.
But it’s a loss leader, don’t you see? People who come to the gas station for the one cent gas are going to spend all the money they save (and then some) on $15 packs of cigarettes and $2.75 bottles of water. And don’t forget the Slim Jims!
What’s this about “no advertisement of the promotion”? All those people heard about it, didn’t they? If I heard on the radio that some gas station was selling penny gas, I would assume that the the gas station intended for the radio to announce that.
It’s not so much that a store wouldn’t use a radio for promotion, but that selling gas for one cent a gallon is a completely insane act. Giveaways aren’t usually $40 a pop to anyone who shows up. Maybe a free donut, or a small fries, or a taco, which often wind up being bundled with a larger purchase. Who gives $40 of merchandise to a customer that is immediately getting into their car to drive away, and doing it over and over again for hours?
Here you go The Virginian-Pilot - Virginia News, Sports, Weather, Business & Things to Do
"The president of Priority Chevrolet apologized Wednesday for the arrest of a customer in June whom the dealership mistakenly undercharged for an SUV and who resisted the company’s efforts to get him to sign a new, costlier contract.
Dennis Ellmer said he’s heard from Chesapeake police that one of his managers told an officer that Danny Sawyer of Chesapeake had stolen a 2012 Chevrolet Traverse."
I’m of the view that if the store has marked the item at a certain price (i.e. someone hasn’t switched the labels) then that’s the price they’re selling it for. Admittedly I usually ask the cashier to confirm the price so that I know what I’ll be paying at the counter but if they want to sell me something at a 90% discount who I am to decide whether it’s a mistake or not?
So you’re saying it’s un-ethical to go to a store because you heard or saw an advertisement of a good sale?!? That doesn’t make any sense.
AFAIK The radio station wasn’t running promotion ads. The news article said a comment was posted on the radio station’s facebook page. I understood that to be a comment from a DJ or some other employee.
Promotion ads are usually clearly identified. Valentines Day offer, buy 1 box candy and get 1 free, Presidents Day Sale etc.
In fact whoever posted this seemed to suspect the gas station had made a mistake.
I’ve bought penny books and cd’s before. The standard shipping you are charged is like $2.98. The actual postage stamped on the box might be $1.49. So yes, they are making their profit on the shipping.
Good retailers will honor the price and then change whatever went wrong and they will do it fast.
Example: I used to sell jewelry at a department store, then I left. Shortly after I left I got an ad in the mail and among the offerings was a certain ring that usually went for $399-$360 (with a “full price” of $600). The flyer said it was $39. So I went in to buy it, and of course it was a mistake. But, had I been a regular customer and not a former employee, they would have sold it to me at that price and then got a sign up really quick saying the price was incorrect in the flyer. As I was a former employee and the people behind the counter knew me–no, I did not get that ring. And they did get the sign up quick.
It’s not theft if the price is as marked or as advertised. I’m really surprised the Kmart manager didn’t honor the price of those speakers before quickly changing it.
But I recently bought a Dutch oven, and there were two in stock. One of them had a scratch, but it had a price tag. The other one didn’t have a price tag. When I got to checkout the clerk asked me if I knew the price and I said $40. She rang up $14. I corrected her. If I hadn’t, that might have been considered theft, or at any rate I would have felt bad.
Oh, and you know the old “If there’s no price on it it’s free, right?” I used to get asked that about five time a day when I worked retail, but once, I was buying a bunch of stuff, and a pair of pants did not have a price, and the clerk just looked at it and then threw it in my bag. No, I didn’t say anything.
Yeah, that’s the setup for something similar to what the OP asked. Just a lot more than a few bucks off a gallon of gas. Not sure how it would have been resolved if the dealer had taken a gentler approach to claiming theft. Probably would have ended up as a civil, rather than criminal matter. I could imagine the dealer winning that just thru a bigger legal wallet.
But who are we to judge whether a store is being insane or not? If I walk into my local shop and see a special offer, I don’t critically analyse it to judge whether it is sane or not, I just take it as given.
Special offers are ubiquitous these days, at least where I live. I don’t spend any time wondering if they are good for the sellers, I simply assess whether or not they are a good deal for me. If some gas station wanted to start selling gas at below cost price then who am I to tell them how to run their business. I will just buy the gas at the price they are selling it and get on with my life. Certainly doesn’t make me a criminal.
If it were theft, there wouldn’t be laws in many states compelling the merchant to sell it at the mismarked price, even if the merchant protests that it was an error. In some states (e.g. Michigan), if an item scans above its marked price, the merchant is obliged to refund the difference plus an additional penalty awarded to the “thief” who presents it to the cashier…
A problem for the dealer though is that this is very close to a shady thing dealers are known to do. They sell a car promising a low interest rate, then call a few days later saying that they couldn’t actually secure a loan at that rate and want the customer to resign the docs at higher rate.