I know you’ve talked about this before but here is an example of the price on the shelf being lower than the price at the register. At the Lilburn Walmart, in the isle DayQuil/NyQuil combo pack was listed as $8.94, at the register it rang up as $9.96. I had to take a picture of the price in the isle, then stand in line at customer service to get my $1.08 refunded. I swear they do this on purpose because they know most people won’t catch it or won’t bother taking the time to get the refund.
Walmart? Maybe they prey on the customer like that. They may be short of help to change the price tags though. The old price tag has a 02/23/23 date on it. That might have been the last time it had a price increase. Prices have been going up a lot lately.
Sometimes is just that tags didn’t get updated. Many shelf tags have dates on them. Sometimes the item tags get missed – the worker didn’t have the tag, or got re-assigned to some other task, etc.
The store must honor the posted price (even for sale prices that have expired).
Another thing, too – with Target, if the online app shows a lower price than the shelf tag, they will honor that price. But you have to show them (or have them look up) the online price, and they will override the price.
Of course, this means more effort by the consumer…!
But after working retail, I learned to look up prices, price match. And if I see a good price on a shelf tag, I take a photo, in case I need it at the register.
I usually use the Walmart app scanner to check certain items just to make sure.
They probably figure most people won’t stand in line for 15 or 20 minutes to get their small amount back.
Everything you really didn’t want to know about BARCODES, those stripes on products. They were developed in 1952 and first used by railroads to track railcars at 100 mph as they passed.
In the olden days, a stock clerk would have to use a little machine to place price stickers on each product and reprice them when t hey changed price. Once products had barcodes on them, shelf price tags showed the price and the computer which managed the scanning could be updated. Thus prices could change in the computer and someone just has to change one label on the shelf. Some stores repriced groceries every week and some every night. At the time, many grocery stores would give you one of the products free if the price was different in the computer.
The lines in the barcodes were based upon Morse Code and over time there appeared many varities of formats. There are general produc codes, codes for items like books and international formats. Later Q-Codes, those squares with squares in them took over for other uses.
There is a non-profit group which dispenses barcodes, but the system is geared towards large companys is not useful for the guy like me who wants to code just a couple of products to sell in a local store. The codes do no have any pricing built in nor do they automatically tell what product they represent. All they do is identify a company. Thus a company buys a block of numbers and self-identifies which number goes on which product. Then when they arrive at a store, the store Manager enters the name, description and price into their computer and prints a shelf price tag. This is why you could take a product from one store to another and scan it and it might not show up, would show up with a somewhat different name and/or different price. It might even have a different tax associated with it either by accident or if a town or county or state line were passed between stores.
The local store will have a price in their computer and that price may or may not have been uploaded to the stores main computer at corporate. Each local scaner in a store is connected to a store computer and I do not know if they currently store the codes and prices in each register. I would think not as then all registers would have the same price. I was common in the past to be in a store while all registers were rebooting and loading and everyone had to wait for the store computer to come back online. The app on your phone is probably not looking at the local store computer price, rather it is getting the corporate listed data. That data is adjusted to the local store which is why the app looks at your GPS location or asks whic zip or store you are at. It would be ill-advised to have local shoppers access the store computer directly for pricing. Thus a store prices the items and uploads that data to corporate which then makes the data available. That upload may be overnight. If the company also has a web-based sales arm it may be managed by a different division or even by a 3rd party company. Thus thier pricing may be different than a particular store. The store may match the price to keep the local customer loyal than have them walk out and buy it online.
A couple decades ago, it was possible for a company to give or sell their excess barcodes to other people. The non-profit group put the kabash to that and added a clause to their contract with the companys. Still, if the codes were sold prior to that clause, people like me could buy a block of excess codes for their own few products. The codes were still listed as belonging to that original company which may be out of business however the stores would be inputting the new owners name into the computer. Only two or three companys in the U.S. refuse to allow those re-used code number (Walmart being the largest one). Many other people, like ones who sell on Amazon will use International number formats.Some people erroniously think that certain blocks of numbers belong to a certain country, but that cannot be relied upon, so saying that you can hurt a specific country based upon not buying products starting with a certain number, is wrong. Some of the codes I purchased for my U.S. made products show a code from England.
Because vegetables and similar items are sold loose and there may be multiple similar products, stores often place a 4 or 5 digit PLU (Price Lookup Labal) on them. These are retailer stickers managed by the stores.