Advance warning: this is a really bitchy, whiny post. I am sacrificing enough karma by venting therein to cause me at least one lower incarnation, I'm pretty sure.
We have, in our area, a lot of shopping options. Save Mor[e] (formerly Albertson's), Safeway, Nob Hill, Whole Foods, Trader Joe's, multiple fresh produce markets and farmer's markets, and if you go that way, Costco, Walmart, and Target. We typically do the weekly run to Whole Foods and supplemental trips as necessary just about everywhere else during the course of a cycle of a few months, depending on what else I'm doing, with the exception of Walmart, the threshold of which I shall not cross. We've been going to Safeway for milk and OJ and such more of late because the boys have been getting ahead of our weekly hauling capacity and the storage supply of our fridge (there's only so many gallons of milk I can fit) and it's closer. But I consider myself a fair connoisseur of the area's grocery options.
Now, again, I'm fully aware this is a whine, because in Pittsburgh, we had one (1) grocery store chain, Giggle, or Gintiggle if you want to pronounce more syllables, aka Giant Eagle, and when you consider that just Pittsburgh proper had as many people in it as all of Monterey County, it suggests to me the Attorney General of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania has a little investigating to do about competition. I'm grateful to have options.
They all have their individual flaws - you know, union-busting health-insurance denying CEOs and high prices (Whole Foods) dingy lighting and incomprehensible aisles (Safeway) utterly unpredictable stock (Costco), etc. They also have a common problem, and I'm not talking about the insane parking lots (looking hard at you especially TJ's - how on earth did you get that plan past Monterey City Council after the debacle of the Pacific Grove store?) I'm not even talking about the complete lack of ability to bag groceries, although this is my own special burden, having been a bag boy at Heinen's in a previous life. (I actually had to argue with the bagger at Whole Foods last week not to put the cantaloupe in the same bag with the cherry tomatoes.)
No, I'm talking about regular pricing errors. I have a hard time checking the receipts each week -- usually I'm in the middle of some complicated kid-wrangle -- and an even harder time following what's going on on the registers. But I try to pay attention, and I detect errors in how my stuff is rung up at least half my visits.
I know in other jurisdictions there have been accusations retailers have done this on a systematic basis, and I'm not saying this is the case here. It most likely isn't. It doesn't fit that kind of pattern. It feels like sloppiness, allowed by the fact most shoppers don't check and it's a high-volume, low-margin business, which is a disincentive for the stores to have better procedures to prevent overcharging. Although I do note that about a quarter of the time there's an error I correct at the checkstand, it's the checker forgetting to charge me for something or undercharging. Maybe from the retailers' standpoint it all evens out or something.
So for the most part I'm talking about errors that add up to no more than a buck or two per visit, but I dunno, they bother me. My grandparents, genuinely frugal people, would no doubt consider me a spendthrift in the first place for paying an extra buck for organic milk not even to think about all the other stuff we buy that would've been a frill for them, and I'm certain I spend (inflation adjusted) a lot more per family member on food than my parents ever did or do now (hey, I'm writing a flog, aren't I? Maybe I can deduct my groceries on my taxes now...?) So this is probably in addition to a whine, rank hypocrisy. But it bothers me.
And part of what bothers me is about half the time I let it slide, because I'm distracted with a kid, or the line is busy, or what have you. The half the time I complain, I usually get satisfaction, though. I may confuse the clerk, I may irk the customer in line behind me, but I think there's a general acceptance that I have a right to get the price as marked. Once I found a nice price on the shelf for roasted red peppers, basically half off, and these things don't go bad so I got a half dozen jars. They rang up at the regular price. I objected, because, hey this was real money. They went through the elaborate and time-consuming motions of price-checking, claimed they had the regular price correct, and I then insisted the manager go back to the part of the store with me and showed him the price listing and cowed him into giving them to me at that price. He at least had the decency to apologize to me. When I'm spending a couple of benjamins at a store, I expect the staff to be grateful I'm giving them my business in a competitive market in a recession.
This is why the following type of incident, which seems to have happened more to me in the last year, is puzzling. This was extreme -- in part because for some reason I held out for a very small amount of money, but also in part because the store was giving me grief over a very small amount of money. I'll protect the identity of the store here -- let's call it "Hole Phoods" for the sake of argument.
I bought three avocados with the marked price of 99 cents each (Chilean imports). They also had another kind (Haas) of avocado marked at five for $5, and full organic avocados for $1.99 each. I had taken the 99 cent, Chilean avocados, because they'd been better than the Haas avocados.
I'm watching the register ring, and the avocados ring up at $3.00. I pause a beat, then ask the clerk if she hadn't rung them up wrong. She said, no, avocados are a dollar each. I said, well, they're marked at 99 cents each. She looks at me and utters the wrong words: "It's only three cents difference." As in, what's the BFD? So I say again, "they're marked at 99 cents, I want 99 cents for them." So what does she do? Sends the bagger to do a price check! Who comes back and says "they're five for $5." And looking at me like I'm the dumbest guy ever, says "that makes them a dollar a piece, $5 divided by 5 times three is $3." I'm in a bad mood, I take the checker back to the produce area, show her the 99 cents, and she realizes, yes, there are two kinds of avocados side by side. We go back to the checker, who now starts wondering to herself what the code is for the avocados. So she spends a couple of minutes poking around her produce list. (And yes, there is a line of customers waiting here. I make no apologies here, this time.) So she finally takes off the avocados at $1, and rings in the new code...which rings up as the organic avocados at $1.99 each. And, yes, I had to correct that, too. The code is right on the $*#))@) avocado. It even says "Chile" on the thing. She then rings it up again...and it comes out at $1. She looks at me and says "it's ringing up at a dollar each, that must be the correct price." I told her I expected the store to honor the marked price. She gives me the look that I took unmistakeably to mean, "it's just three cents" while I'm giving her a look that I hope unmistakeably means "it's just three cents". I asked, "do I have to ask the manager for my three cents?" Fortunately, or rather, unfortunately, a manager overhears this, and the clerk and the bagger and I have to go through the whole discussion about the prices. At this point I am keenly aware of the ludicrousness of the situation, but have gotten into such a cruddy uncharitable frame of mind I'm ready to chain myself to the checkstand until they come across. Finally the manager makes some inscrutable notes, takes out a key, and takes three cents out of the till and gives it to me.
Yes, this is extreme. Let's ignore the fact the store wasted more than 3 cents worth of my time, and even the fact they probably wasted at least a couple of dollars of wage-slave time among their three employees, or the time of everybody behind me. What happened to taking the customer's word for something as simple as three cents? Or the general concept of good will?
As I said, it's not just the one incident. I've had this happen seemingly more frequently the past year. Am I getting to be a curmudgeonly skinflint, and just noticing, and in turn, objecting more? Or are the stores, in recession, being deliberately obtuse in general about checking the accuracy of their prices, and making appropriate remediation when they make a mistake? I leave that as an open question for readers.
I'm not proud of my stand at the checkstand, since I think had I been in a better-adjusted mood I would've eaten the 3 cents for the sake of the customers behind me. Or is it the case that this is the only way to keep stores honest, or at least efficient? Either way I'm not a happy customer.
