This very rarely happens in MA, because when it does the store has to give you the item for $10 off, including if that makes it free. And they have to post a sign at the register explaining the law, which means when you're invoking it all you need to do is point at the sign.
https://www.mass.gov/info-details/consumer-pricing-accuracy-...
The confusion around this law is quite frustrating, though. Quite a few customers think they're entitled to not just prices on tags that haven't been updated, but prices for what are clearly entirely different products.
Where I live there’s no such rule I can tell you no one is correcting the price when I point out that I got overcharged (they usually shrug with “it does that sometimes”).
If not, there’s an obvious loophole here. Misprice intentionally, then stop purchasing the item from your distributor if you get called on it, rotating in some similar thing. Later, bring it back with a different sku, or mispriced at some other level.
This would work well for dollar stores, which are optimized to spread in / sustain food/retail deserts.
The store is often literally the only option in town. The wouldn’t even need to sell excess warehouse inventory at the advertised price, since they could just shift supply to another state (or county/store, depending on how poorly the law is worded).
I wanted to purchase a laptop at the advertised price. The sales person told me i was in luck, because all their laptops came preinstalled with Microsoft Office for a little extra money. I told him politely i did not want to buy Microsoft Office, even for such little extra money. I just wanted the laptop.
Semi-flabbergasted he told me this was not possible, because all the laptops had Office pre-installed. I told him i did not care and wanted to buy the laptop for the adverstised price.
After 15 minutes of discussion, some manager came frustrated what the problem was. I pointed to the price tag and told him i wanted to buy the laptop for that price exactly and if that was possible. It was, but it would require uninstalling Office, which took them another 15 minutes.
So i waited for another 15 minutes so they could remove Office. Back at home i powered on the laptop, popped in a usb disk and removed every partition that its harddisk ever had and started a nice fresh install without any bloatware.
There are of course exceptions; I can recall not long ago for example buying a pound of Himalayan sea salt for a dollar. That was a solid deal, and I haven’t seen it since.
But generally speaking, if you want to save money, don’t go to Dollar Tree.
> When buying groceries—food and non-alcoholic beverages, pet food or supplies, disposable paper or plastic products, soap, household cleaners, laundry products, or light bulbs—you must be charged the lowest displayed price, whether on the sticker, scanner, website, or app.
I think part of the appeal when everything was a dollar was so that people would know exactly how much it would be when they went to check out. Then they could manage a little bit of money with precision.
For staples that's definitely sensible but surely there are also times where you need one-off items where any extra amount would just be waste?
With your focus on calories per dollar, do you also get supplements? Which ones and where?
Why are you so focused on this?
We would preinstall office on say 80% of the door buster laptops for something like $29. Most people used office so they’d pay it. Occasionally some people didn’t want it so they’d buy a bare laptop.
If all the bare laptops had been sold, we’d remove office from one of the preinstalled laptops. Then we’d take the box and send it back to the inventory guys to process and get credit back from the vendor. As part of that process we were supposed to verify to Microsoft that the product wasn’t installed on any machines.
So they weren’t tracking keys, but the manager wasn’t doing it to spite the OP, he was just doing what the vendor asked for.
https://mda.maryland.gov/Documents/HANDBOOK%20130%20Examinat...
Practically-speaking, stores have at least as long as it takes for an inspector to come out to the physical location. So, yes, it's a bit of a loophole, but I imagine that if you're mispricing as a matter of course and getting hit with complaints and constant inspections, you're probably going to eventually get fined (unless you're paying off inspectors). Store operations are usually designed to catch mistakes, as half the job is making sure items are stocked and labeled correctly. (I think most stores would prefer to transition to essentially local warehouses that delivered to customers from online orders, so that they wouldn't have to deal with any of this, but then they'd lose out on impulse purchases.)
Other customers are complaining about the checkout delay the store created, so I'm not worried about what they think.
Having a large home is a prerequisite for shopping at Costco.
They do follow up with serial offenders.
(That being said, even though I think it's a silly rule, it just seems to exist to annoy alcoholics who can't plan ahead. I'm not an alcoholic, and I rarely consume alcohol before noon, so I just laugh at people who whine about this law.)
https://www.citizensadvice.org.uk/consumer/somethings-gone-w...
In the 00s I worked for a supermarket that would always honour the price on the label if you pointed out an error (we'd then remove the label with the error).
We had teams that would regularly check all the labels to make sure they are not out of date. Nowadays many stores where I live now use e-paper displays that update automatically.
I live in Massachusetts, the bluest of blue states, and we still have special laws about Alcohol on Sunday. According to Gemini, Logan airport can't start serving until 10 a.m. (Because in Massachusetts, we don't want you getting drunk on the way to your Unitarian or interfaith Sunday service after you get off of your red-eye flight.)
You can also try reading https://www.mass.gov/guides/working-on-sundays-and-holidays-... if you have the time.
And yes there are times when some cannot always afford bigger quantities. But we’re not talking about 50 pound bags at Costco here; The price per pound for a ten pound bag of something at Walmart vs a six ouncer at DT is substantial.
it's aimed at not encouraging consumption which is slightly different. you can have a "hungry hour" where you entice people with food bargains and sell them alcohol, but you can't have a "happy hour" where you entice people with alcohol bargains.
it is also in keeping with other laws intended to create a competitive/collusion free market (not saying the crafting of those laws was not influenced by incumbents trying to maintain their share)
yes there are, but the anti happy hour laws are only from the 1970-80s, Mothers Against Drunk Driving, raise the drinking age campaigns.
the previous round of laws like that were from the Temperance, Prohibition, lifting of Prohibition periods.
then before that, yes the Puritan Blue Laws.