It Pays to Check Your Receipt: $20 Deli Meat Edition
Posted by Lise on 01 May 2008 at 11:30 am | Tagged as: personal finance
I stopped at Hannaford last night to pick up a few essentials for sandwiches. We went through the express lane, because we only had a few items (deli meat and cheese, wraps, cream cheese), and I was surprised to see my order ring up at $35. I briefly thought food prices really have gone up, huh?
While Matt was swiping his card, I looked at the cashier’s screen then, and noticed the only double-digit item: Black Forest turkey ham: 1 lb @ $19.75.
Matt realized it at the same time I did. “What?” he said, at the same time I said, “That’s not right.” The sign at the deli had said $4.49/lb, but now I realized that the sticker from the deli read $19.75/lb. Why I didn’t notice this mistake when I put it in my cart, I don’t know.
They gladly fixed the error and gave me a shiny new $20 bill back. My only regret is that I didn’t catch the error before Matt swiped his card, because cash, as I’ve discussed before, has a different psychological weight than plastic.
What’s also alarming is that I caught the error simply because there was another row of digits - they could have charged me $9.95/lb and I probably wouldn’t have noticed.
I tend to use self-checkout systems, but I always ahve this little compulsive habit of watching the screens and checking the receipts. At least a handful of times I’ve caught accidental double-scans, mispricings, or typos-when-keying-in-produce-codes.
Chad: When I lived in Watertown, I used the self-checkout at the Stop & Shop pretty regularly, but Hannaford doesn’t have them yet. Luckily, the cashiers at Hannaford are some of the friendliest, helpful store emeployees I’ve ever seen. Everyone was very apologetic about this error.
…although Jess told me they’re supposed to give you the item free + $1 if it rings up incorrectly. Where’s my extra $1?
I keep telling my husband, “don’t swipe your card until we have the total!” I use lots of coupons and watch the monitors at Publix like crazy. I can’t tell you how many mistakes I find. It’s at least once a month. So, we get free things from their Publix Promise, and walk away paying what we actually should. Every once in awhile though, he swipes that card and it’s off to customer service we go to stand in line yet again… *sighs* (One time we made the mistake–we got charged about $12 for three star fruit. Turns out we misread the sign because it had several “real names” on it and we thought we knew which was which. Well, we didn’t. We returned them right away. I like start fruit but I don’t $4/each like it!