alt Hacker News> Dollar General’s lawyers argued that “it is virtually impossible for a retailer to match shelf pricing and scanned pricing 100% of the time for all items. Perfection in this regard is neither plausible nor expected under the law.”
Can you explain to me how USA is called civilized? How somebody can say things like that, and how a shop is even allowed to have an error margin
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bob1029 • last Monday at 8:50 AM
I worked in retail for a few years. A very large part of my job was simply keeping physical paper price tags in sync with the database. Minimum wage employees in a back office manually keying in UPCs, etc. The claim is extremely accurate in my experience.
Expecting physical reality to synchronously conform to a policy in an information system is pretty silly.
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The article touches on this:
All told, 69 of the 300 items came up higher at the register: a 23% error rate that exceeded the state’s limit by more than tenfold.
This implies that an error rate of perhaps 2% would be legal. I haven't checked, but I guess Europe has something similar even though I'm quite certain that retailers have to sell things at the posted price if there's a mistake.
Part of the problem seems to be that the maximum fine (at least in the state in the article) is "too low", so retailers don't have an incentive to keep price tags correct since they profit from the error and even if they're fined it's still better (economically) for them to charge more than the price tag. I wonder how much lobbying has happened to keep fines low ...