←back to thread

Dollar-stores overcharge customers while promising low prices

(www.theguardian.com)
510 points bookofjoe | 3 comments | 07 Dec 25 14:37 UTC | HN request time: 0.014s | source
Show context
soanvig ◴[08 Dec 25 08:42 UTC] No.46189893[source]▶
> 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

replies(2): >>46189918 #>>46189946 #
1. bob1029 ◴[08 Dec 25 08:50 UTC] No.46189946[source]▶
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.

replies(1): >>46190019 #
2. wodenokoto ◴[08 Dec 25 09:01 UTC] No.46190019[source]▶
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.

replies(1): >>46196642 #
3. bob1029 ◴[08 Dec 25 19:40 UTC] No.46196642[source]▶
> 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.