Dollar-stores overcharge customers while promising low prices

In Australia, according to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission:

- Businesses must communicate clear and accurate prices prior to consumers booking, ordering or purchasing. They must not mislead consumers about their prices.

- There are specific laws about how businesses must display their prices.

- Businesses must display a total price that includes taxes, duties and all unavoidable or pre-selected extra fees.

- If a business charges a surcharge for card payments, weekends or public holidays, it must follow the rules about displaying the surcharge.

- If more than one price is displayed for an item, the business must charge the lowest price, or stop selling the item until the price is corrected.

In practice, if the checkout price is more than listed price, many retailers give the item for free. It doesn’t stop dodgy constantly fluctuating ‘on sale’ pricing…

https://www.accc.gov.au/business/pricing/price-displays

Requirements about surcharge notifications and displaying all-up prices are nice, but the gap here will still be about enforcement and not regulation. The core problem for dollar-store shoppers in the US is about getting the retailers to honor the sticker price, not whether the sticker price shows all state and local taxes.

Is the Australian shopper protected simply by a stronger culture of adherence amongst retailers or is it because regulators inspect more often and take stronger action against failures?

I guess it might be a cultural thing? The shelf price is the binding price here in practice. If you get to the register at the supermarket and the price is higher, you can just let them know and they will send someone to check the price and match it.

Yes, probably difficult to compare regulation and inspection.

As for enforcement, ACCC recently took Microsoft to Federal Court for hiding Copilot pricing shenanigans, as discussed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45721682

Yes, seems to be partly regulation and enforcement partly cultural in a voluntary code of conduct that tends towards benefit to the consumer. For example,

[All the major grocery retailers] are signatories to the voluntary code of practice for computerised checkout systems in supermarkets. Generally, this means that if an item is scanned at the checkout at a higher price than it says on the shelf or as advertised, a customer is entitled to receive the first item free and all multiples of the same item at the lower price.

https://www.choice.com.au/shopping/consumer-rights-and-advic...

This practice not just matches price (dang, you caught us out this time), but incentivises minimising errors (oops, our bad, have it for free).

Regulators take tip offs and if one gets through, the enforcement action is usually pretty fast and strong.

They also like doing this. The ACCC makes a huge deal out of parading their latest conquest in the media.

Has its faults, the ACCCs dealings with telcos are especially terrible.

I still have friends at an Applecare provider based in oz, and they had a big one where as a settlement with the ACCC over trying to have it both ways with consumer law, they agreed to provide repairs or replacements for like a decade of wrongfully denied hardware issues. Hushed it right up. It was in lieu of a public apology from memory. But my friends spent weeks calling back old customers, chasing new contact details etc, to try and get them all free replacements.