A common piece of advice frequently given to shoppers is to check grocery store receipts for mistakes. This advice is now more important than ever!
You see supermarket offers are becoming ever more complex. Instead of a simple price discount, you’re often required to purchase multiple quantities of a product in order to obtain an even larger discount. Buy 2 bottles of soda get 1 free. Save $3 when you purchase 2 jars of spaghetti.
This works for the supermarket as they sell more product and it also works for you as you frequently enjoy larger discounts for buying more.
The problem with these increasingly complex grocery store offers is this. If the store scanner is not programmed correctly, the mistake will cost you more money than usual.
Let me give you an example.
A recent Chicago supermarket offered Marie Callender frozen dinners on sale for $2.99, or you could get the frozen dinners for the super low price of $1.99 IF you purchased 5 or more dinners. Naturally I picked up five dinners and placed them in my cart.
The problem arose when I arrived at the check-out counter. My total appeared to be $5 more than I had mentally calculated.
As the cashier and I scoured the receipt looking for the reason behind the $5 discrepancy, the store manager walked by glancing at the five dinners sitting at the end of the checkout counter. She then quickly relayed to the cashier that the scanners were having a problem applying the discount. It seems that I was still being charged $2.99 when I should have been charge $1.99 for the frozen dinners, creating the $5 overcharge.
As the manager had just taken care of another gentleman who was similarly overpriced, she quickly took care of me and I was on my way with my $5 in hand.
But I wonder how many others paying less attention walked out of the store not realizing that they had left their hard earned $5 in store cash register.
Have you been a victim of scanner errors or mispriced merchandise? If so tell us about it. Leave a comment below.
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I find errors on my tab all the time and i feel this is unacceptable. Either they fail to give me a credit for using reusuable bags or an item is mischarged.
Oh my goodness, this is a huge problem for me. I’m so busy at the checkout, putting my stuff on the belt, bagging my groceries since “I have my own bags” seems to stump the bagger, scanning my card and pushing all those buttons that I find I can’t watch the items being rung up. Chances are good that even if I was watching I wouldn’t remember the prices anyway. What I might call attention to in the store, is never worth it once I get home and go over the receipt. I still haven’t found a remedy for this issue!
My post on this very topic will post tomorrow morning; my husband was telling me how he was overcharged because there was a limit of two on the meat he bought. SimplyForties, my husband has taken over the grocery shopping for the past year or so, but I somehow developed the knack of remembering the prices of all the items we’d purchased. My mom always watched the prices being charged, so I try to do it, but if I can’t, I check the receipt. Sometimes I can’t remember the price exactly, so I’ll go back into the store to check. Some of our local stores used to give the item to you free if you reported it scanned wrong. I think it was supposed to be “incentive” for them to get the price changed right away, but I have seen them leave the wrong price for weeks in a row. Great post.
Mrs. Accountability,
Looking forward to reading your post. I think this is a more common problem than people think. That’s one of the reasons I consider going to the self checkout machines so I can make sure the prices are coming up correctly.
SimplyForties,
I understand completely. Its seems like you wait an eternity in line then all of sudden you have 3 or 4 things to do all at the same time (swipe the credit card, make sure you press the right buttons, decline their special offer of the day, make sure all the prices ring up correctly, and make sure everything is bagged correctly). =)