Is it theft if a customer purchases an item he knows is incorrectly priced?

To the OP, I think it would be hard to prosecute a customer for theft. If the customer paid for gas without talking to the attendant, he would have had to use a credit card. The customer could easily say that they didn’t notice the amount on the screen was less than it should have been. There would have been nothing to sign, and you don’t even get a receipt unless you ask for it.

At the gas station I managed, the oil major could (and did) schedule deliveries to meet their own schedules.

Sometimes it feels a little shady.

I was in a store and saw some shoes on sale. They had only one pair in my size, so I tried them on, liked them and grabbed the box to buy them. Except the tag said $9.99. All the other pairs were $49.99. I knew it was a pricing error and said as much to the salesperson. She scanned it and it scanned at $49.99, but because the box was incorrectly tagged, she told me that she was, by store policy, obliged to give them to me at that price. So I bought them, but it felt weird and felt a little like I was scamming them, even though I had nothing to do with the price tag being incorrect.

Got a great deal, and can’t complain about that, but yeah, felt a bit like I was stealing.

I was overcharged by a couple dollars on a bag of cat food once… probably wouldn’t have noticed except it was the only thing I bought that trip and I remembered looking at the shelf tag. I paid the cashier the higher price that rang up, but then went back to check the shelf price (figured I was mistaken), but the shelf was clearly labeled a lower price. So on my way out, I stopped at the customer service desk to complain. I would have been happy to just get the couple dollars difference that I was expecting, but the manager (or whoever it was on duty at the desk) said that the store had a policy that in a case of being overcharged, the customer gets one of the item FREE and can buy others at the lower price if they desire. So she refunded the full amount I paid, meaning I got the cat food for free. Cool policy, I thought.

The next day I was doing a more complete trip, and noticed that the cat food shelf was still marked with the lower price. Now, it had been a full day, they were notified of the error, and had ample opportunity to fix it. So I grabbed another one, and sure enough it rang up at a higher price. After checkout, I went over to the customer service desk and got my refund, citing their policy (a different clerk was manning the desk). No problem, refund received, have a nice day. I felt absolutely no guilt whatsoever.

Believe it or not, the next day it was still not corrected. I think "Score!: (pet food is expensive, and it keeps well, so why not stock up). I grab a bag, sure enough it rings up for the higher price. But now I see that the same clerk that was there the first day is at the customer service desk again. Even though I probably could have gotten a refund again, (she might not even remember me) I decided not to ask again. I still don’t think what I did was wrong or illegal, but I guess I did feel a little guilty or I would have gone through with it. I have no idea how many more days until the price was fixed.

Over here, the lower of the two prices is the price the store must honour, but they are allowed to withdraw the item from sale. They cannot charge you the higher price. I recall our manager shifting a pallet display of paper reams off the shop floor after head office transposed the single ream/box of six reams prices (a single ream for $22 wasn’t an attractive offer, but a six pack for $4 was too much of a good thing).

Our supermarkets adhere to a voluntary code of practice that requires them to give you the mispriced item for free. If you are buying more than one, you get the first item for free and the rest for the lower of the two prices. The onus is on the supermarket to be diligent about making sure their prices are accurate.

Who am I to judge? I am an adult with a functioning brain. Look, this “offer” is the equivalent of selling a brand new state of the art $1000 TV for $3, to every customer that walks into the store, by “word of mouth” advertising, at a store that only sells those TVs.

This could only be a more obvious mistake if they were charging a negative price, and crediting customer accounts instead of charging them. To claim otherwise is to be deliberately obtuse in order to justify poor behavior. Note, not criminal, just lousy.

Bullshit. Yes, its an offer that seems too good to be true, but its still not on me to do the due diligence for the seller. Everybody will know that $3 is not the expected price for a high end TV, but its not my job to take the seller into a quiet corner and give them advice about proper pricing.

What if that $1000 tv was sold for $300? Do you still have to inform the seller that in your opinion the price is too low? In a world of special offers and loss leaders do I have to ask the seller every single time “hey, are you really sure you want to sell this? I mean really, really sure?”

Of course not. A company is selling a product. I pay the price they ask for whether it is scanned on a barcode or verbally requested by a teller, and its certainly not on me to second guess whether or not they would have preferred a different price.

I didn’t say it was your job, just don’t insult my intelligence by suggesting these people thought they were taking advantage of a “great deal” and not taking advantage of a “colossal fuckup”.

I would just like to point out that postage does not equal shipping. The packaging costs money; the person who stuffs it into an envelope gets paid; at some point they had to buy the postage scale & postage meter. When I sold stuff on amazon, the shipping cost I was allowed to charge exceeded my cost when my time was factored in (sending it media rate, which meant I had to take it to the PO rather than click & ship from home).

I am honest to a fault in almost all situations and have corrected a cashier if they are undercharging me. Except for one instance at Home Depot. I was buying drawer pulls for our kitchen renovation and knew exactly what I wanted. There weren’t enough on the shelf so I hunted down an employee after some effort, who grudgingly got one of those portable stairways and climbed up to get me a full box of them. Instead of handing them to me, he slammed them down on the stairs and walked away.

Okay, bad day, I get it. So I went up to the cashier, who had her back to the service line and was yakking with someone two registers away. I stood politely for a while, realized that they were gossiping rather than discussing business, and cleared my throat. She turns her head and sees me, and then turns away and continues talking! I waited a little longer and then said “Excuse me, could you please ring these up?” She heaves a heavy sigh, rolls her eyes at the other woman, and scans the box of hardware, along with the extra loose pulls I needed to make up my total. The total came to something like $17.95, which didn’t register on my brain at the moment.

I handed her a $50, and she sighs again, drags out a stack of one dollar bills and starts counting out my change. 32 fucking ones and a nickle. I said “Are you kidding me?” She just gives me a deadpan look. Angry, I grabbed the bag and headed for the door and actually heard her snicker behind me. Suddenly, my brain registered that I had just purchased 28 drawer pulls at a ridiculous price. I stopped, looked at the receipt, and there were five charges of something like $3.95 each: one charge of $3.95 for each of the four loose pulls and one charge of $3.95 for the box of 24. It’s the only time I just kept on walking. Oh, and fuck Home Depot.

I’m not aware of any legal answer with regard to theft, but the situation is covered by the “unilateral mistake” theory of contract law, which says that a contract cannot be formed when the parties are not in agreement about the terms.

Take the example a famous case in 1990 involving a Nolan Ryan rookie card. The owner of the store where the card was for sale marked it with a price of “$1200.” He intended that to mean “$1,200,” but the clerk manning the register misinterpreted the price tag and sold the card for $12.00 to a kid who knew the true value of the card.

Under the facts of the case, there probably was not a binding contract, since the buyer knew that the card was not really being offered for sale at $12.00; the price charged by the clerk was an obvious mistake. The seller had two remedies, either get the balance of the value from the buyer or get the card back. (The owner did sue, but the case eventually settled, with the card selling at auction and the proceeds going to charity). I think the same would hold true for the situation involving the $0.01/gallon gas, except that the seller can’t realistically get the gas back and it probably isn’t worth the effort to file suit against each individual purchaser anyway.

If, however, the owner of the card (or gas) priced it low without knowledge of the true value, then the sale would be an enforceable contract because there’s no mistake on the terms. In that situation, the owner meant to sell the card for $12.00 and the buyer isn’t penalized for the owner’s mistake in valuation.

There’s a lot of nuance in application of the unilateral mistake theory, so the above is just a general discussion only.

The law simply does not allow this willful blindness. You (the general you) know good and well that the store is not offering a new HDTV for $3. You know that gasoline is not 1 cent per gallon. Absent some other evidence (e.g. You bought a new car so you first month’s worth of fill ups were at 1 cent per gallon, or you bought a new living room set of furniture and a $3 TV was part of the deal) the law will presume that you meant to deprive the owner of his property.

Now, there will be evidentiary problems. Perhaps you were in a hurry, paid with a credit card, and didn’t see the final price. Maybe you can convince a jury that you were feeble-minded enough to believe the Facebook Ad. It would be hard to prove all of the elements were there, but by the book it is a theft.

So would this also encompass items bought at estate sales, garage sales and thrift stores? We read every once in a while of people who have purchased very valuable items for pennies at a garage sale:
2.2 million dollar chinese bowl

I bought my wife a ring at an estate sale for $450.00 that appraised at $5000.00 a couple of years later.

Yes, the unilateral mistake theory applies there, too, same as above. If the seller was mistaken about the value of the ring and priced it at $450, your purchase at that price is, in most cases, binding. It gets trickier when you’re dealing with things that the buyer recognizes as more valuable, such as a Picasso. If the seller doesn’t know it’s a Picasso, and the buyer does, that may be enough to establish a unilateral mistake and either void the sale or entitle the seller to the balance.

That particular scenario would be covered by many state’s consumer protection laws. If an item is marked on the shelf for a certain price, and it rings up at a higher price you get a the item for free, or a $20 credit off the price (at least in Connecticut).

Eliahna, I’m from the same location as you, and I was in ALDI yesterday. I don’t know if ALDI claims to honour the voluntary scanning code of practice, or claims to honour part of it, or honour it sometimes, but whatever: the manager didn’t give me the item that scanned at a higher price than the marked price.

I should be able to expect better from the two majors, but my experience has been poor. And the local where I used to shop actually took down their scanning-code-of-practice poster because they decided they didn’t like it.

Ah. Well, it is a voluntary code of practice, and looking at the official website of ANRA, Aldi is not a signatory. My recollection that “all” the supermarkets in the local market had signed on is outdated.

Here’s my story, which I am not exactly proud of.

There’s a neighborhood bar around where I work (midtown Manhattan), and they specialize in Mexican food and drinks. So they have an excellent tequila selection and some Mexican beers.

One night, I noticed that they had a bottle of Chartreuse VEP behind the bar. Now I love Chartreuse, but it is an expensive, imported, limited production kind of thing, and not that many places have it. And the VEP version is even that much rarer and more expensive; you normally see it only in very upscale cocktail bars, where a single one ounce pour of it might cost upwards of $30. To see it in this type of establishment was kind of unusual.

So I said what the hell and asked for a Charteuse VEP, rocks.

It then transpired that this bottle had been there longer than any employee or manager could remember, no customer had ever ordered it within memory, and it did not even exist in their cashier database system (in fact, when I asked for it, they didn’t even know what I was talking about: “See, up there . . . to the left . . . no, above the Kahlua . . . the one with the pale green label . . . yes, that one!”)

So since no one knew where it came from, and it wasn’t in their database, they told me they would just ring it up as a generic well drink. To which I felt I had to reply: “Are you sure? This is really expensive stuff . . .”

“Maybe so, but we don’t have any record of it and it’s not in our system, so there’s no way to ring it up except as a generic well drink.”

To which I could only answer “OK.”

And over the course of the next year, I drank that entire bottle for less than $10 per two ounce pour. They might have made several hundred dollars on that bottle at the correct price (but only if anyone else ever ordered it, and apparently no one ever did—and even I would not have ordered it more than once if they were serving it at the price it usually commands).

So, me: unethical or not?

Agreed. However the unilateral and mutual mistake theories in contract are so circular in logic that is basically comes down to a court deciding whether what happened was “fair” or not with a lean towards upholding the contract. And that will generally come down to the difference between market value and price, and the location of the sale. The garage sale seller would get more leeway than a professional merchant.

The $450 ring worth $5000 sold at a garage sale would probably be upheld because the court would probably rule that the risk of mistake falls on the seller. If the seller wanted max value, then he should have done more research.

If the facts were changed and the $20 painting sold at a garage sale was really worth $20 million, then the court would probably say that the seller was operating under a mistake of fact because no reasonable seller would let such an item go for such a small sum.

Of course, almost no seller would let a $5000 ring go for $450 but the courts seem to think that is more reasonable.

Hoops, you pointed out that the item is on the pricey side, and then they said “I know” but that they can’t work around the internal POS system … I deem you absolved of guilt of unethical behavior.