I am not an English teacher or a linguist, but it seems to me that the different spellings of “jewelers” you provided are not necessarily incorrect. I believe that the spelling jeweler is more American, while the spelling jeweller is more British while “jeweler’s” might have been used as in “jeweler’s store” as a possessive.
Jeweler’s: Used in a name like “David’s Jeweler’s.”
Jewellers: You’re right in that jewellers appears to be the British way. However, this was in America. I guess if the store was originally British, I could cut it some slack, but I don’t remember which store it was.
This was a story related to me by a professor in English.
That first link from cmosdes is great. I couldn’t get to the audio, unfortunately, but I did find this YouTube video that made me very stabby!
Actually, the store’s not legally obligated to do anything. For a contract to be valid, there has to be an offer and an acceptace. Thing is, the advertisement is NOT the offer.
The offer and acceptance comes at the checkout counter. You present a product to them, they ring it up and say how much it costs. At that point, you accept their price and swipe your credit card. But nobody’s contractually bound by an advertising sign.
Now, on the topic of false advertising, you may have something. But in this case…well…good luck.
In the UK the advertised price is binding.
After all, it would be impossible to say whether every customer knew that the price must have been written wrongly. I’m not American, and I don’t know much about hardwood flooring, so I wouldn’t necessarily know that planks for just under a penny weren’t just a loss-leader or a tax writer-off or something.
I have bought a couple of stupidly cheap things at supermarkets because of this before. The best one was mince marked down to something silly like 10p per pack, and being buy-one-get-one-free, with the ‘free’ one being discounted at the original full price. They paid *me *around £1.40 per pack to take lots of mince home.