Stores need price anomaly code of practice
On May 14 I was shopping at a Fusion store in Sheung Wan. My basket of items included chocolate bars with a small discount.
Like many of these Fusion stores, this one is always busy, with long queues at the checkouts. When I finally got to a checkout, I was disappointed but not surprised to see the chocolate bars scanned at HK$5 higher than they were ticketed on the shelf. This has happened to me often enough to know I was faced with the difficult challenge of “putting up and shutting up” and avoiding the hostility of the checkout person or pointing out the discrepancy. I chose the latter course of action.
The employee left her checkout station, walked past the long queue to the shelf where she checked and realised I was right.
Then she returned to her till, she had to fetch a supervisor and have the purchases reversed and rescanned at the right price. There was no apology, just a handover of the HK$10 difference between the shelf price and what I had been charged. Even though this was not intentional, the whole experience appeared to be crafted to make me feel like a complaining customer the store could well do without.
I would suggest that customers rarely point out this sort of anomaly at this store and many other busy ones. This is great for the supermarket chains which can advertise a special on the shelf with little diligence to remove it at the end of the sales period as it is unlikely customers will complain. Such complacency is not common abroad.
In some other parts of the world I am familiar with, supermarkets follow a voluntary code of practice assuring customers that they are on the ball when it comes to ensuring that the shelf price is the one that will be charged at the checkout. If the scanned price is higher than the one on the shelf, the customer gets the item free of charge.