Brought to you by my discovery that some people think that “the customer is always right” isn’t the slogan of a long-dead department store, but rather it’s an actual call the cops law.
Yay! I have one. We had a customer grab a product from a spot on the shelf next to where it was normally stocked. The spots have labels indicating the price of the item. This person argued that because the product was in the wrong spot they should only have to pay the price of the item that should have been there. The prices also include the name of the product. The reason the the product was taking up space in the next spot was because we had sold out due to the item being deeply discounted because we were discontinuing it. When we explained that they began accusing us of false advertising and threatened to call the better business bureau. They admitted that they knew it was the wrong product but insisted that because it wasn’t shelved in the right spot that was some kind of loophole. I gave a firm no and then they asked to speak to a manager. I fucked off it was taken care of.
I also work front end, I’ve had sooo many people give me this shit.
#1 Not advertising. Advertising is what you see before you enter the building. Some stores don’t even have shelf labels.
#2 Do you think someone can walk up to your garage sale and slap their own sticker that says $1 and demand you sell them a TV for $1? No, you can refuse to sell your own shit whenever you want. It’s YOUR shit. You can burn it in front of them if you felt like it.
Not really the case in most of the EU.
It doesn’t count obviously if it’s a misplaced item and the price is clearly labelled for another item. However, if a store leaves discount stickers on some product late, or mislabels some price, they are obligated to sell at that price. There is caveat that it only works if the price is believable, but I managed to get a ton of shrimp that just arrived at a Lidl 90% off one time. Family was eating shrimp for weeks.
I used to work in a supermarket in the UK about 20 years ago. The store is not legally required to sell anything to anyone (as long as it’s not because they are discriminating against a protected characteristic), so the workaround for the store was to say that the item was no longer for sale and to remove it from the shop floor (presumably fixing the labeling, then putting the stock back out)
Where in the EU would that be the case?
AFAIK a legally binding contract only happens once you actually exchange money for a product. That should be true pretty much all over the world as long as there’s actual laws/customs regulating this process.
Any prices/offers or whatever else you might see in or around a store are in no way legally binding no matter how believable the prices are.
Otherwise anyone can just run around with a 10/20/50% off sticker and force any store to sell them whatever they want for much cheaper.
My dad and I were shopping at Home Depot one December and found a small Christmas decoration I wanted. When we got it to the register the cashier couldn’t find a tag or sticker on it. Normally I’d go get another one with a tag but this was the only one they had. The cashier tried looking it up through the computer system but still couldn’t figure it out. She handed it to us and told us it was free because it was the store’s fault that she couldn’t find the price.
We’ve been enjoying that decoration for years, my mom still puts it in the middle of her kitchen display. And we always remember how nice that cashier was to us.
Reminds me of a really old Saturday Night Live “commercial” for a supermarket price gun. They showed a person shopping for all sorts of premium goods (steaks, etc) and re-labeling them all as something like $0.79, and the cashier blindly ringing them up for that price.
Granted that was from probably 30+ years ago now…
Here’s example language from New York City law:
All consumer commodities … shall have … a sign at the point of display which indicates the item to which the price refers, provided that this information is plainly visible at the point of display for sale of the items so indicated.
So it is a question of whether the product spilling over to an adjacent shelf still has a “plainly visible” price tag. If it were on a wrong shelf entirely it would not, and here there is some ambiguity, but city inspectors can be pretty strict and demand items stay within the lines. If it is decided the price was not plainly visible, the store may be fined $25-$100 per violation per day. In any case, the customer would not be calling “better business bureau” (which is just yelp from before the internet), but the Commissioner of Department of Consumer and Worker Protection. And the customer would also not get to pay the lower price for the other product if it is clear it is a different product, as the customer admits they knew. (The question would be different if there were ambiguity).
However, the point that I specifically object to is the opinion that it was preposterous for the customer to claim some legal right in this situation, the implication that no such right exists. The language of the law does exist (at least in some jurisdictions), and violations do carry legal penalties.
