Last week I purchased two used CDs from an online vendor (who shall remain nameless…for now) which were priced at $11.99 and $14.99. These were the best prices I could find since both CDs are quite rare, and with a 50% coupon for the less expensive CD, seemed like a pretty sweet deal.
But when I got the package today, to my surprise, both CDs had price tags already on them – one for $6.99, the other for $7.99. Quite a difference!
So, before calling them up and raising holy hell, I gotta know – are they in any way legally obligated to honor the “tagged” price? Or am I stuck paying the price they advertised?
Can you tell if they are price tags from the vendor? Could this be a small, single-person operation, and he bought the CDs from a store for that price? Or are those the manufacturer’s original prices?
Not sure that any of that would matter, though. You didn’t see the tags until you received the CDs, so you weren’t relying on the price on the tag in any way. And as you said, they are rare.
Good question. Did you buy them in an online auction or just from an online website. If you bought them in an auction then I think you’re out of luck. Whatever the traffic will bear and all…
If you didn’t buy them in an online auction, I still don’t think the vendor would be legally obligated to refund you the difference, but they might do it if they want to keep you as a customer…
I would contact them as a bewildered customer before ‘raising holy hell’ and see what they say. What have you got to lose?
IANAL, but I’d assume the price tags are irrelevant. All they mean is that someone, at some time, sold or tried to sell those CDs for those prices, which doesn’t tell you what the CDs are worth now. Actually, it doesn’t even mean that: if the price tags are stuck to the jewel cases, they may have originally been on different CDs.
Vendor bought CDs somewhere fpr a lower price.
Vendor is in the business of making a profit, sells them for more.
What am I missing?
Or alternatively, price tags were leftover from unsold items.
Most brick and mortar stores have a clause along the lines of: store has no obligation to meet the price tag of an item that was incorrectly priced due to typographic or user error, tampering, or anything else.
As said, you could contact them, politely, but I don’t see why they have any obligation to correct a non-error.
In a bricks-and-mortar store, a price tag is generally seen as an invitation to treat. If the item is tagged at $9.99, that’s an invitation to you to offer $9.99 for it; the vendor may or may not accept that offer (though, of course, he usually does, either because that’s the price he wants, or because although the tag is an error he values your goodwill enough to honour the tagged price).
But a price tag on an item you have already bought, and now own? That’s meaningless. Why would you offer anybody any amount of money for something you already own?
But wait, isn’t it a crime to not honor the advertised price of an item in a physical store? Wouldn’t McDonalds get in trouble if I ordered something from their Dollar Menu and they charged me $3.99 instead?
Absent some unusual local law, no, they wouldn’t. There is no contract of sale until you have made an offer of money for the product and the retailer has accepted it. So:
You pick up an item on the supermarket shelf marked $9.99 and you bring it to the checkout.
The checkout operator scans it and the till rings up $19.99.
You say “No, that’s not right. Look, it says $9.99 right here on the product”.
The operator (after much confusion, consultation with superiors, etc) says “Sorry, that price tag got put on by mistake. The correct price is $19.99.”
You say “but I want it for $9.99! I’ve gone to all the trouble of picking it up and carrying it to the till! I wouldn’t have done that if you’d priced it correctly!”
The operator says “Sorry, no sale.”
You stalk off in high dudgeon, with one arm as long as the other.
You are royally, and rightly, pissed off, but no crime has been committed. It’s not an offence to indicate that you will sell something for a stated price, but subsequently decide not to sell it for that price.
(In practice, a lot of merchants will have a policy of honouring the ticketed price, even if it’s a mistake. But they do that because they value your goodwill, not because they have a legal obligation to honour it.)
Just to add - the situation in the UK is exactly the same. The only (minor) caveat would be if there was some intention to deceive.
Of course many retailers do it all the time - “Grand Sale - Sofas from £99.00.” Once inside the store they are all out of £99 sofas, but “We do have this really really nice one for £299.”
In Australia, the seller would be in violation of the law if he insisted on charging $19.99 for an item marked $9.99. The lower of the two prices must be honored by the seller, although he does have the option to withdraw the item from sale. Even better if it is a supermarket - most are signatories to the scanning code of practice, and that requires the incorrectly marked item to be given to the customer free of charge (if they’re buying multiples of the same item they get the first one free and the rest for the lower price).
I know what “high dudgeon” means but I (ignorant Yank that I am) have never encountered the idiom " …with one arm as long as the other." Does it mean carrying nothing, as in “… walked away empty-handed?”
In the UK, there is a rule/regulation about incorrect scanning, where the item is not individually marked with a price, and the buyer is mislead by a shelf-edge label. No free items though.
I now use the facility to scan my purchases as I shop - I do find errors, and draw them to the attention of the staff. Unless they are in my favour of course.
Exactly - not carrying anything. It can refer either to a failure to complete a purchase/collection or similar transaction, or to arriving at a social event without bringing the expected gift/bottle of wine/whatever.
Actually, there’s a specific law that protects customers in that case. If the store didn’t use scanners it would be one thing, but once they have scanners both the city and state can and will levy fines against the store if the price on the shelf doesn’t match the price at the register.
Here’s a cite for MI, the first state that came up when I went looking for it. In my city, the health dept comes around once a year to every store that has scanners, pulls 50 items off the shelves, writes down the prices and then scans them to make sure they come up as the right price. If they’re wrong he gives them 30 days to fix it or they get a fine. The state will also do inspections, he said they don’t mess around with the fines. He said that he finds a lot of mistakes in the big mega marts and it’s worth keeping an eye on the price of the things you buy since they have so many prices to try to keep track of. Also, just FTR, I know I said Heath Dept, but in my city, if he’s not wearing his Health Dept hat, he’s wearing his Dept of Weights & Measures hat and checking scales or gas pumps. Oh, and we pay for this privilege. My store doesn’t have scanners, but I do have 4 scales that get checked each year at $37 a piece. None of them have ever been wrong.
The advertised price in this case, was the price stated on the website when you clicked “submit.”
Even if what you say is true (which has been addressed - it’s not a crime and rarely a tort) when did the seller advertise the stickered price to you? Never, from the sound of it. So what does advertised price have to do with your situation?
The seller purchased something at a low price and sold it at a profit without removing the prior stickers. Such are the horrors of capitalism you must endure.
At least once a day I’ll get a customer that thinks he’s being funny by saying “this doesn’t have a price on it, is it free, har har har” sometimes I’ll respond by saying “Sure, but that other thing in your cart with two price tags, you have to pay for it twice”.