I have a question?

[Lewisc]

The store doesn't care how many items my "friend" may have moved to the wrong rack. If the items have a similar price point I would expect most stores would allow me to purchase as a goodwill gesture.

If a store has a pattern of abuse (sale signs are always on extra racks for example) consumer affairs (in some areas) might fine a store. Caldors in NY got into trouble regularly for both not properly pricing sale merchandise and not having enough stock of sale merchandise.

I repeat my point, we get a lot more as goodwill than we are entitled to under consumer laws. I bought a compute game from CompUsa. It rang up $12 more than the shelf price. They sold it to me at the shelf price even though the difference was more than $10. BTW the store neglected to change the shelf price after the game went off sale. The scanned price was correct the shelf price was wrong.

Originally posted by Daxx
Lewisc - You're welcome. I hope you find them interesting!

Now, I agree- -- if an item is put on a rack and it's obvious that it's not on sale, then I would not expect to get it at a cut rate.

What if there are several (say 25) of the wrong item on the sale rack? And, they are not marked, and the price reads "Shirts $3.00, original price $8.99" and the other shirts (25 of them, on the same rack) happen to be at the $8.99 price point, though?

Not an arguement ... just wondering.

 

[YesDear]

I called the NC Attorney General's Office today. Was told a lady in Consumer Affairs Division could answer my questions. She has not as yet called me back. Stay tooned!!!

 

[YesDear]

I have just spoken the Attorney General's Consumer Affairs Division and the NC Dept of Agriculture. (I will explain that in a minute.

First: There is NO specific state statute in NC pertaining to sales and signage. The very nice lady I spoke to said their belief is a retailer has the right to correct an error before the sale is completed. She did say that if they found a merchant that consistently or intentionally misstated or mislead the customer AG would pursue under deceptive trade practices, however, errors in signage and sales are considered mistakes. She and I agreed that many merchants would honor small mistakes as a goodwill gesture. (Please excuse me for using that term, but she used it first!)

I did specifically ask about the $399.00 item which was advertised at $39.99 and she quickly said the merchant could go broke if forced to honor it.

Second: The reason I called the NC Agriculture Dept was they are the state agency, which controls weights and measures, including scanners in NC. The only statute regarding that issue is the following:

§ 81A-23. Misrepresentation of pricing.
No person shall misrepresent the price of any commodity
or service sold, offered, exposed, or advertised for sale by
weight, measure, or count, nor represent the price in any manner
calculated or tending to mislead or in any way deceive a person.
(1975, c. 544.)

A very generic statute. The lady there said they expect the merchant to honor the "shelf price". If the scanner is higher, the merchant must honor the lower price. If the shelf price is higher then the scanned price, the Dept of Agriculture could care less. She also indicated they will audit retailers systematically and only get concerned at the error rate on the high side. She did offer that a recent study they did, did find a high error rate for many retailers, but that the errors tended to be equal on the low and high side.

I did also find out that this sort of thing in NC is controlled by the State. Our county governments seem to have a different charge legislatively then in other states. They do not have the authority to legislate this issue.

I am still very interested in what other states may do. I now also just using NC and NY as an example understand why so many on these boards get so "excited" about positions posters will take on an issue of sales and discounts. We all tend to speak from our own frame of reference.

 

[Lewisc]

We are so used to stores honoring small mistakes for goodwill that we don't realize that (usually) the store is under no legal obligation to do so.

In the example of the thread being referenced Disney honored the incorrect signage twice. The second time the person knew it was a mistake but Disney (goodwill) still honored it.

Site like fatwallet are filled with people ordering items that have an obvious mistake in pricing. At one time the stores issued small gift certificates as a courtesy but now they just cancel the order.

NY will go after stores that have a pattern of deceptive ads. NY tends to have pretty good consumer laws. I doubt you'll find any states that require store to honor mistakes.

 

[YesDear]

Thanks Lewisc for the response.

As this thread seems to be dying, I wanted to say that we all need to be careful when stating things as facts and laws. On that particular thread you referred to, several respondants strongly stated what the law said. Just remember that that may not be true everywhere and there is a lot more goodwill shown by merchants today then we may think.

We are always going to run into rude people that act like jerks. They are on the merchant side and on the customer side. So everybody just play nice!!

I hope that did not sound preachy. Was not intended to!