Studies: Wal-Mart check-out errors exceed U.S. guidelines

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. charged the wrong price to shoppers in California and the Midwest at a rate that exceeds those set by federal guidelines, according to two union-commissioned university studies released Monday.

Researchers said random purchases at 60 Wal-Mart stores in California found that the wrong price came up 8.3 percent of the time. At 78 stores in Illinois, Indiana and Michigan, check-out scanners rang up the wrong price 6.4 percent of the time. In both states, some prices rang up higher and some were lower.

In Connecticut, Attorney General Richard Blumenthal said he will investigate Wal-Mart's pricing practices to determine whether similar discrepancies exist.

"Nothing is more fundamental to fair pricing than keeping promises about prices," Blumenthal said in a press release. "Consumers should be spared a sweepstakes system when they come to the cash register. They deserve reliable, rock-solid price guarantees. The price they are given should be the price they are charged."

http://www.boston.com/news/local/connecticut/articles/2005/11/21/studies_wal_mart_check_out_errors_exceed_us_guidelines/?rss_id=Boston.com+%2F+News

do these mistae prices skew in favor of WalMart, or the customer, in a statistically meaningful manner?

i got my bets. i wonder if its flagrant.

happened at about the same rate as the Diebold voting errors skewed in Bush's favor.

If they are doing this, then I'm sure it's a few cents on low-cost items that people more than likely aren't going to notice nor really care about. But with Walmart's volume, I'm sure it adds up.

To play devil's advocate...the workers get paid a pittance, and I'm sure that (once again) with their volume and their touted habit of changing (and ostensibly lowering) prices, odds are it's likely that there are probably anywhere from 50-100 mispriced items in any given store.

Some prices were up, some were down, but overall Walmart profited from the mistakes, right?

Call me psychic.

but I get steamed when checkers start scanning and I can't see the screen to see if prices are what they are supposed to be.

Is that how they have it set up?

I don't go to Walmart, either. But I always check the screen, and I check my receipt, too. Sometimes I don't check it in the store, if it is a long one like a grocery store receipt. But I do check.

They really do that?

at the grocery stores in this area(there are basically two chains)- if an item rings up at the wrong price- it's free(except liquor). i ALWAYS double-check the reciept, and i would say that on average, on orders of more than 15 items, 75% there's something marked wrong. one time it was a $20+ bottle of detergent, another time a $13 bottle of maple syrup...

i've NEVER been to walmart tho.

after i pay for my groceries, i move out of the way and check my print-out of my receipt at my old lady in a cadillac pace

if i find a mistake, i go over to customer service, which is near the front where i am standing, in my walmart anyway

customer service gives me cash, not a gift card, to correct the mistake since it is not like i left the store and then came back and complained, it's something they can easily check if they feel like going through my groceries

you could probably ask the clerks to slow down but i think they are rated on how fast they go, and i don't want to harm their rating on the job, so i just do it that way

it works for me and the savings is well worth it for me, your mileage may vary

the other poster's comment about free groceries reminds me, the other day, the clerk gave me two pounds of butter free, it wasn't at walmart tho, but she was peeved because the scanner wasn't giving the right price, the best mistake at that store, a sav-a-center, was when a bottle of tequila wouldn't scan and the clerk finally just put it in my bag, i didn't think they could do liquor either but i'm not gonna argue, but these weren't really mistakes, they were scanning errors and frustrated clerks making an executive decision to donate the goods that wouldn't scan

The customer can't see the checkout scanning screen!

Why those thieving and exploiting bastards!:grr:

Well it's hardly surprising. If you're not getting anything out of working there except a minimum wage and no hope of moving up, there's not really much motivation to work hard and make sure everything's accurate.

They couldn't of they wanted to. Not enough time, most items aren't marked, etc. It is home office's -- they're the ones that plug in the prices.

Some news show did a special on this about ten years ago -- they went to several Sears all over the country, and the same item was wrong; they reported it at each store... it was NEVER fixed in the national database! EVERY misring was FOR the store. Ha!

I'd put this down to the incompetence of underpaid and undertrained managers rather than any sinister motives.

I used to work in a grocery store and we had pricing problems all the time (because the manager either forgot to change the prices of sale items or did it wrong.) And the customers would glare at me like I was trying to rip them off for their 20 cents on toilet paper.

Checkers are pressured to move fast, not only by the other customers in the line but by the managers. Our software tracked how many items you moved per hour and the slowest checkers got chewed out by the managers on a weekly basis. After I'd worked there about six months, we had a "security expert" come in and secret shop us. We all got written up for failing to stop and check the price after each item (never mind that this would have tripled check-out time for the customers.) Then it turns out we were all supposed to have gotten three hours of paid "security" training when we were first hired but the manager was too cheap to give it to us.

At the store i once worked, we had a free item policy,if it scanned incorrectly, BUT the problem is that people are distracted at the register, and most never noticed if something was priced incorrectly.

and usually the amount is small, and once home, people will not get back in their cars to complain about a 59 cent item..

when the boxes and cans have a price tag on them it's easy to keep track of prices at the register and watch for discrepancies. Most of the big grocery chains had the policy similar to the one you described. When scanners were new I'd get two or three items free every trip.

You're right that most people won't bother if they don't notice the overcharge until they get home. For larger volume shoppers it probably evens out in the long haul, but for someone pinching pennies it can be a big deal.

she will drive 10 miles back to the store to right the wrong done to her...

I used to think she was wasting her time but I think she is probably smarter for doing it...

She gets about two items a week for free from various stores because they have overcharged her.

until the next visit, then have them credit me :)

at 74 years of age she is as sharp as a tack and won't let anyone mess with her....

A $6.00 bottle of Jet Dry rang up as $50 contact lens cleaning solution.

I caught it, though. Then the girl doing the check out said, "Oh that happens all the time with that product."

DOH! Maybe they ought to contact the Jet Dry people and tell them that their UPC code is wrong.

My ex worked in a grocery store for a while and one of her duties was to keep up with the changing prices of goods. What happens is that an item is scanned at a register. Then the person doing the changing enters a code and can put in any price for that item, whether up or down, although it's almost always up.

You'd do it on your own system, which in Wal-Mart's case means you'd do it through Bentonville.

Wal-Mart uses a SKU (stock-keeping unit, the code for a particular product) database for their merchandise, same as every other massive retailer. The SKU database at Home Depot is so big it's on its own computer, and Wal-Mart's is even larger.

Let's look at a sample item: GAF Royal Sovereign shingles in Charcoal color. The database will contain, for that one item:

* the SKU itself. In this case it's 929-291.
* a description of the product--Royal Sovereign FR shingle, Charcoal
* the name of the vendor; GAF in this case. It will have their vendor ID number and their direct order contact number.
* the price, and usually a History of Retails which shows the price changes over a period. In my system it's 25 price changes, no matter how long it takes. This means that on some items, like 7/16" oriented strand board, the current price will be knocked off the chart in three months. There are a couple of items in my machine whose price changes so slowly, the price that was current when the first Home Depot opened in 1979 is still in the History of Retails. Wax rings for toilets come to mind--the ones without bolts were a dollar each thirty years ago and they're still a dollar each.
* every UPC that's ever been on this item

I think that what's happening with the Jet Dry is that someone was updating the UPCs on the contact lens cleaner, punched in a wrong digit on the UPC (which just happened to correspond to Jet Dry's UPC), and just clicked to dismiss the "this UPC is already active in the system; would you like to change it to this SKU?" alert without reading it first.

In my morning paperwork is always a price change report. One of us has to take this report, get a pricing cart, and walk around the department fixing price tags. I wonder if anyone at Wal-Mart does that.

I know it stands for "universal price code"...but I thought that was just a consistent serial number that represented a product, and that is translated by the store software into the price they are charging...

Unless the manufacturer physically printed the wrong upc number on a gazillion boxes and it's *supposed* to be the one for the contact lens solution...

Wal-Mart has the best computer systems in retail. It's almost inconceivable that they should have higher-than-average ring errors. I'd like to see a breakout of how many were in their favor and how many in the customer's favor. Because they have shelf pricing, if there are errors, they would be in the price on the shelf, not the one rung up. Since a price change only takes a few seconds on the computer, the culprit would probably being store personnel forgetting to change the shelf price the customer sees. Which should mean that most of the errors would be in the customer's favor. If not, something's rotten in Denmark.

attitude for it. All pricing in the store is managed by a combination of the Telxon client scanners and the inventory/ordering server, communicating with each other through radio. Telxons are those gun looking things that you see some employees use, at Wal*Mart and other retailers. Relatively simple devices, running MS-DOS ROM Version 5.0. Anyways, the Dept. Managers(glorified floor associates), and above are the only ones who are "allowed" access to these things, most of the time. They help manage pricing, mark ups and downs, inventory, and ordering. In the case of pricing, if a mistake is made in pricing or ordering, no Associate Manager is going correct it that day, usually by the time its caught, the ones really responsible are the Dept. Managers, and they are done with their shift by then, not fixed till the next day. As soon as you change a price of an item through the telxon, its changed for EVERYTHING, including the registers, so mistakes can be made, and not really known about for hours.

and a $2.50 bottle of Sunny Delight came up for $750.

That's seven hundred and fifty dollars.

Yeah, there are a lot of mistakes in this company.

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-walmart21nov21,1,1812047.story?coll=la-headlines-business&ctrack=1&cset=true

Wal-Marts Faulted on Errors in Pricing
By Abigail Goldman, Times Staff Writer

Wal-Mart stores in California and three other states have problems charging customers the right amount for their purchases, according to two studies to be released today.

Researchers at UC Berkeley and the University of Illinois-Chicago, funded by a union that is a leading critic of the retailer, found that nearly 9 in 10 stores studied in California fell short of federal standards for accurate pricing.

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