Dollar-stores overcharge customers while promising low prices

> 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

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 ...

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.

You have it backwards. Building a flexible system and constantly changing pricing database without regard to how to physically update prices in the store is the silly thing.

And when the mismatch tends to be in the stores favor, then maybe it isn’t silly but malicious.

The interesting question would be how many products came in lower, but sadly the article doesn't include that.

If 23% were higher and 23% were lower then you could make a reasonable argument that it's just incompetence from the store.

But if 23% are higher and none are lower, then that looks a lot more like malice - because the odds of you happening to have a 23% error rate than just happens to always work out in the retailer's favour are basically zero.

> Building a flexible system and constantly changing pricing database without regard to how to physically update prices in the store is the silly thing.

If corporate had to wait until every store signaled "all clear" on paper tags, most retail businesses would go bankrupt in record time. The margins are not fat enough to run things this slowly.