Supermarket Scanners are a great technological breakthrough, but they increasingly are resulting in consumer rip-off. Two things are going on here. First, because of employee laziness and managerial indifference, the wrong labels are on the shelves for the respective items. Supermarkets are too often "accidentally" leaving a lower sale price (from weeks or even months ago) on the shelf, duping you into buying the product.
The second and far more nefarious thing going on is INTENTIONAL mislabeling. Example and proof: Big displays at the ends of aisles with a superabundance of one product and a sale price displayed on a sign are designed to feature the sale price of the specific item and sell that item. The scam usually is NOT an advertised item (advertised in the paper for example), but is just a big, in-store promotion. Problem is, when you get to the register, it rings up at the full price and if you don't catch it, you overpay (they can't ever be accused of false advertising, by the way, since it was an in store promotional sign). Supermarkets are money making enterprises and they have realized the $ making potential of this display scam (aside from their garden variety wrong shelf-tag price scam).
Case in point. My local supermarket recently had a big, in-store, end-of-the-aisle promotion of potato chips. Big sign, 12 oz. Bag 99 cents. At check out, it comes up $2.99! Supermarket policy: you get the item free if the scanner is wrong. But WAIT! The supermarkets have figured out that even if 2 out of 3 people catch the problem, they still make money!!! (2 people get it free and the third unwittingly pays $2.99 which is the same as seeling 3 bags at 99 cents each which is a money making price to begin with).
Buyer beware, I have been shopping for years and see the trend toward rip-off with these scanners. Classic bait and switch but in this case, they switch the price, not the product. For years, county and state "Weights and Measures" have certified the accuracy of produce and meat scales, gas pumps etc.
They now need to begin certifying the accuracy of shelf pricing. Remember, the scanners themselves are 100% accurate (as long as they're reading the bar code), it's the price labels on the sheves and the computer programming of the scanner where the human error and criminal activity is occuring.
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