Something that drives me absolutely crazy is when you pick up an item in a shop, then you queue (some people even dare pay with checks and they are always in YOUR queue!), and then when you have patiently waited for your turn, the item you want to buy suddenly appears to be much more expensive than it was advertised. I always check the receipts after I buy something, and mind you, there is really often an error, and 99% of the time, in their favor!
courtesy freedigitalphotos.net
To prevent that from happening too often, and I guess to force retailers to take action as soon as the mistake is discovered, some countries have put in place a scanning code of practice. Mr CBB explains how the scanning code of practice works in Canada, items under $10 will be free if they do not scan at the price advertised in the shop. I am sure they will update their computer asap if a $9.99 item has to be given away for free to a customer, whereas without that practice, you can have YOUR receipt rectified and find out the price is still wrong the next time you shop.
My receipt double-checking habit has led to BF getting crazy when I spent 10 minutes trying to get back my change, because I feel cheated. Mochimac talks about how she would ask for a few pennies to be rectified on an invoice too, thank you for not making me feel so alone and crazy! I hate things unfair and consider that when you choose to buy an item there is an implicit contract that you agree to buy it for the price that shows on the item, and the retailer agrees to sell it at that price, not whatever price its computer fancies. In real life it seems much more complicated.
The local supermarket in Guatemala is operated by Walmart and distinguishes itself by its long queues and low number of cashiers open at any one time. It is pretty unusual for Guatemala, where the low cost of labor makes for abundant clerks and random employees, often outnumbering customers. Anyway, you can be sure that there will be at least 5 people queuing behind you, and when the dreaded scan happens, you are in for a treat. If you say you still want the product, the cashier will wait for another employee to go check the real price of your item, then update it in the computer, then wait some more for a manager to approve the change. You can say that you don’t want the product anymore, and ask to have it removed from your cart, but you still have to wait for the manager, and considering how often those oopsies and other events happen, it can take a while. The only good part is other people are really resilient and happy to be waiting. In France they would have guillotined the cashier on place de la Bastille a long time ago.
Anyway, I decided to go back to France for a little while and walked into a shop where I saw that at last, they had put in place a scanning code of practice. It looks like it is not a country wide decision, just in one brand of stores.
While there is no set rule, the cashier would sometimes give you the article for free if there were people waiting and the article wouldn’t scan, or if you challenged the price, they would ask you what you thought the price was, and scan it for that price if it seemed reasonable. Because a few pennies or a couple of Euros are NOT worth having 5 unhappy customers wait for you to double check the price.
This time, the Simply Market chain is finally putting in place a real scanning code of practice. I don’t usually shop there because there is none near my mum’s but there is one near my brother’s, so if I have dinner with him and have to bring something, instead of buying something before I go, I would purposefully go to Simply near his house instead. The procedure is pretty tedious if you want to claim your money back, you have to write with the receipt and so on. But we are a country of deal seekers loophole lovers? can’t seem to find a politically correct word for that! who will not hesitate to buy one item each day and claim it until it scans properly so you can be sure the price will be rectified sooner than later.
Simply Market actually also offers to reimburse you 10 times the price difference, one item per day and per person, if you find the same item cheaper at a nearby store. Another reason to shop there and not do price comparison everywhere. Because once more, there are people who enjoy doing that and will buy and buy until the price is lowered. So you can be assured the inflated price won’t last long.
Would you change your habits if a supermarket had a scanning code of practice and the other one not?
This post was featured on the Yakezie Carnival, Aspiring Blogger, Pearl Trees, thank you!
Although I’d never heard of the term “scanning code of practice,” there are a few rare stores in the USA that do this. The Publix chain of grocery stores in the American southeast has something called the Publix Promise where they’ll give you the item free if it doesn’t scan at the advertised price. As far as I know, there’s no price limit.
From time to time I experience buying goods that the price tag is lower than the price before. Then only to find out in the counter that the actual price of the product is not the same in the tag. I return back the product, I want to show to the management of the store I am not interested anymore after they tried to cheat me. I know this is one of the tactics to attract careless customers. Some customers don’t mind to check the price of goods.
I’ve never heard of that scanning practice here in the US. If they did if you shopped at Kmart basically half the stuff will be free. I think that’s a great policy as it would make stores more diligent. Stores do make it painful when it doesn’t scan, especially grocery stores.
Just last week I got a huge bag of rice for free using SCOP. The rice was on sale for $6.99 and at the cash it rang up $9.99 so I had to let the cashier know the price was incorrect and I would like her to apply SCOP to the purchase. If you don’t tell them, they won’t do it. They will only adjust the price. The advantage of the program for retailers is that they have happy customers that don’t feel cheated or that the store is unorganized. The customer feels appreciated and it shows that the retailers is putting the customer first and adheres to top pricing standards throughout. All you need is one customer to tell you there is a pricing error and it should get fixed straight away. No one is perfect so the system really does help for those that sneak through the cracks. The last thing a shop needs is the reputation that they overcharge people and lose customers. Thanks for sharing mate. I’m off on holidays this week but I’ll be trying to check in. Hope to get you back on GGC… we’re waiting for you. 🙂
I haven’t heard of “scanning codes of practice” but both my wife and I always have such a good idea of what we expect a product to be that we pretty much always catch it if a product doesn’t scan right. We use coupons heavily so that definitely contributes to us being more alert as things are scanned.
There are a handful of stores that do something like this, though it really isn’t widespread. My wife absolutely hates going grocery shopping with me because I have a good memory, remember the prices and will challenge almost anything. The way I figure, I am right more than 50% of the time – so why not try and get it for the right price?
I’ve got to say that I never really check my receipt, I just compare the final price to about what I thought it should be. I’m sure there are plenty of little errors, but my grocery store seems to treat its employees and the community well, so I’m not going to worry too much about it.
There’s a craft place my wife likes to shop at where they don’t use scanners. They just have to manually look up all the prices. It’s so inefficient and a big waste of time. To me it just says the owner doesn’t want to make the long term investment.
I wasn’t sure what Scanning Code of Practice meant, but I know what you mean now. Our local Kroger grocery store has a store policy something along the lines of “Under $10 and price scans wrong, you get it free. Above $10 and wrong price, you get $10 off. Limit 2 items discounted per incorrect price”. Seems fair.
What gets me most often is incorrectly keyed fruit. They use manually entered PLU codes that are typically 4 digits. So one type of green apple that is $0.99/pound might have 1234 as the code, and a different but visually similar apple (not on sale and priced $1.99) might have 5678 as the code. Of course I don’t figure out they charged me $1.99/lb for my big bag of apples until AFTER I get out of the store and drive away. Those $2 apples were pretty sweet though. Just twice the cost I thought they would be!
I hate when things don’t scan well when I check things out at the register. Then I have to ask for the cashier to check it over again and its very annoying. Ugh!
I’m not familiar with the “scanning codes of practice” here either. But it sounds like a good practice. There is nothing more frustrating than waiting in line when a price doesn’t register properly or finding that you have been overcharged. I’m sure lots of people don’t bother to check their receipts or sometimes decide that a few pennies isn’t worth waiting in line. I try to keep my eyes on the register as they scan items as I have a fairly good memory and I don’t want to overpay on anything – definitely NOT a good use of money!
I have to admit that I don’t spend a ton of time checking each item on my receipts. There have been a few times I can remember where something was really obviously wrong, and usually they called over a manager to check on things. I don’t remember getting anything for free, though that would certainly be nice.
I admit I’m a bit of a hawk on this front. Just the other day I held up a line because my twelve pack of PBR was charged a dollar more than it should have been. There’s some sort of joke in there about cheap hipsters, I’m sure…
haha, I would have done the same.
I have never heard of this before. I’m not too picky really if something comes down to cents. I probably don’t notice, but often times they forget to scan my coupons which I always have to remind them about. Interesting how patient the people of Guatemala seem to be. Americans are not that patient either.
I guess it is a mix of being good natured and knowing that it won’t make the queue go faster.
Nobody is very patient here either. I love guillotine references, great analogy. I don’t know if there is a standard code of practice here but Safeway did give me an item for free because the price rang up too high. I am usually too distracted at the checkout to really pay as much attention as I should, though.
Thanks for the mention!
Safeway was my favorite store in the US. Their prices are pretty high if you don’t have the Safeway card but I don’t remember a wrong scan.
I check receipts too, Pauline – it’s the principle of the thing! I wish we had the scanning code of practice here, and I would definitely change my shopping habits if we did!
If everyone relied on them having the right price they could go on for months overcharging but thanks to a few people always rectifying it, most customers are charged fairly.
I have never asked for the bill to be rectified for a few pennies of discrepancy, but I have for anything over $1. There are a few companies here that have a code of practice that they stand by which is great. I think it’s important.
This practice gives me a glimmer of hope for customer service. Lately, I have noted that service everywhere and for everything is piss poor and getting worse. This is a good positive note for the customer. If one is to pay for a good or service, then every effort ought to be made by the owner to make the experience tip-top, efficient and the like. I see very little effort in this area. I can say one nice thing about an online company called Strings by Mail. They always get my order right and they always deliver on time and they always include a hand-written note in the box with my guitar strings. Great post and great writing, Pauline!!!
The hand-written note is a really nice touch. I have a similar company called MAX that does parts for my motorcycle and they are very helpful with great prices. Too bad those companies are not the norm.