This guy on San Fran’s “Woody Show” goes into Office Max, twice, and loses his shit after every item he brings up to the counter rings up higher than its shelf-price. Not only does no one seem to care, one employee even insinuates that the complainant might be partially at fault for Office Max’s inability to shelve things in the right place. Neither disc jockey, producer, crazed customer, Office Max employees number 1 and 2, nor Office Max Manager seem to realize that if the item is found on the store shelves under a certain price, as long as the description matches the product, the store has to honor the price. It’s the law. In addition to a an amusing radio clip and animation, The Woody Show also has material here for a complaint to their state’s Attorney General. Video, inside…
(Thanks to Clokeisgod!)
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Every store with shelf pricing has the item description on the shelf tag. If someone put the item on the shelf under the wrong tag, they do NOT have to honor the price; if the description on the tag matches the item, however, they must honor it. If the former was the case, consumer fraud would be rampant in these situations.
LOL classic
@Hanke:
I agree. I think the conclusions of law that Ben made are inappropriate, over-broad and incorrect. Further, most of the consumer protection laws vary state-by-state, so simply saying “it’s against the law” isn’t terribly accurate. Maybe a cite to this “law” that requires Best Buy to sell an $300 item that I place on a shelf for a $2 item to the next guy who picks it up?
LOL!!
Sadly this is true, but not just in Office Max. I have been thru the same situation…sometimes they will honor it other times they will say “well that tag isn’t suppose to be there and there is nothing I can do about it!”
@Hanke: But that is not what happened. It sounds like it was the right tag but the wrong price.
OMG, Anger FTW!
Does Office Max mark SKU’s or UPC codes on the price tags? That would be a quick way to ensure proper pricing for both the store and the customer. Conversely, if a Logitech Mouse is in the slot with a tag stating only “Logitech Mouse,” like some stores have, then I’d say the description matches and they need to honor it.
In the former case, I guess the best you could do is claim that some items were purposefully misplaced or neglected (given the employees’ attitudes), and that waiting forever in line to purchase a mis-priced item qualifies as a kind of bait-and-switch. But, it seems easier to just scream one big “Screw this craphole, I’m buying somewhere else!” and then buy somewhere else.
I’ve seen this happen at Fred Meyers in the Northwest. Strange, it always seems to be in the grocery store’s favor.
Best animation evar. I love it.
That was GREAT!
As a former employee of a big box retailer, its company policy to match the sku of the product with the sku on the shelf tag.
If the price is lower on the shelf tag I would give it to the customer IF there was more then one item stocked with the tag. Too often you get Joe Cheapskate trying to get a $100 product for $5.00 by switching the tags.
If it was me servicing this hack, I would have taken all the items off the counter, voided his transaction and told the general manager that he used vulgar language and threatened me, then escorted him out the door.
listen, i can SOOOO relate to this story – it’s freakin’ crazy. i feel like the cartoon guy. same exact thing, i was trying to buy a white board & markers – only when i got to the register, they couldn’t ring it up. cashier gets on her little headset & calls three – THREE! – different people to the front. where did you find this? *walk to item* here. ok. *walk back to front* it won’t ring up so just put in the price or something, I’VE BEEN HERE FOR 30 MINUTES ALREADY JUST TO BUY A FREAKING WHITEBOARD. sorry sir, i can’t sell it to you wha-WHAT?!? well, we don’t sell this. it’s not in our system. i don’t know where you found it, but you can’t buy it.
i was dumbfounded. here i am trying to buy something that they have a gazillion of & evidently, they don’t sell it. i even tried saying “well, if you don’t sell it & you don’t know where i got it, then i’ll just take it.” no, b/c that would be stealing. NO, IT WOULDN’T BE STEALING B/C YOU DON’T SELL IT!!! WHERE’S YOUR F-ING MANAGER???!??!
anyway, i left w/o a white board or markers, never to return. f- you, office max.
Here’s the audio link if you don’t want to deal with the video:
[www.live105.com]
Very funny. Too bad it happens all the time. But on another note some cashier rang up my item yesterday and charged me less than what it was priced as. Usually I would point this out but lately with gas prices and all the corporations ripping off customers I gladly paid less. Take that “man”.
@cubensis: I based my comment on Ben’s editorial, not the event that occured. And my comment does include the right description/wrong price would make it a valid claim.
Hmm. I have found this at Walmart twice in the last six months. I avoid Walmart like the plague but sometimes they have something I can’t get anywhere in town. I found a digital camera that was $9.99 (yes I made sure it was the right tag) when I rung it up on the self checkout it came up as $35.00. The person monitoring the self checkout just shrugged her shoulders at me when I pointed it out and wouldn’t adjust the price. So I didn’t buy it and left.
I grabbed a pair of sandals that were supposed to be $12.00. I was in a hurry to pay via the express lane checkout, swiped the card, shoved the receipt in the bag and left. The next day I noticed they charged me $24.00 for the sandals and had not rung them up twice. They also had the price on the plastic cable that was holding the shoes together so there was no “wrong price tag”.
Had I not paid attention both times Walmart would have scammed me out of $37.01 on two small purchases.
Twice out of three times I bought something in six months? Has to be a scam.
This is why I don’t shop at Office Max.
Hey I can add to that:
Dont ever buy freaking hard drives there or at Staples. The Maxtor Boxed drives do NOT have the same warranty as drives purchased at newegg or other reputable shops. You would think a ‘retail boxed’ drive would have a better warranty than a ‘bagged’ drive but nope one year on the drive.
Here is the rub: I purchased 14 maxtor drives for different projects. All failed roughly in 30 days around the warranty date!! I have 2 still at home that developed bad sectors. The ones others bought that I installed failed also.
A lesson learned. I dont stray from Newegg for parts.
I have a vague recollection of a story w/regards to Walmart I heard when I was in college (it was a while back). Basically they got in trouble because they were investigated and it was found that incorrect pricing occurred in the store’s favor too often.
If it’s a pricing mistake, odds would dictate it should happen *at least* 50% of the time in the customer’s favor. The percentage in the customer’s favor should increase because it’s logical to assume that customers will complain when they are over-charged… so mistakes in the stores favor should be reduced even further.
You know who does a beautiful job with pricing? Kroger. If they ring up an item and the price is wrong, they give it to you free. They then march over to the customer help desk and somebody goes and fixes the price.
Think about the overwhelming amount of inventory a grocery store like Kroger has to deal with and the hundreds of items that are repriced each week for sales. If they can do a decent job of keeping marked prices correct, there is no excuse for a store like Office Max (with half the inventory quantity) to be able to do the same.
i suggest screaming and cursing about how you’re going to sue the store and get everybody fired.
That generally makes the manager want to help you more. just and FYI
two stores that i frequent, have store policies pertaining to scanning errors. For example, at wal-mart, if an item scans higher than the price on the shelf, they will do the following. if the item is $3 or less, the will give it to you for free. if the item is more than $3 they will give you $3 dollars off. At kroger they do the same thing except as far as i know, they don’t have a $ limit. As for a store giving a high dollar item for free because it scanned wrong, i would like to see proof of this so called law. i just can’t see best buy or circuit city giving a free tv away because it scanned wrong. most likely they would charge you the correct price or maybe even the lower price if you complained about it.
The Office Max employees at the San Francisco Arguello location are usually too busy holding “chair races” to actually do anything so I can’t say I’m surprised.
@hi:
Nice rationalization…gotta love the sliding scale of justice (corporations better not screw me, but I can screw them!)
As a retail employee i can see this from both perspectives. A lot of times
what happens is an employee will put an entire box of product in the wrong
spot because he is not paying attention. But it does get annoying when a
customer has obviously picked a product up and put it down in the wrong
spot, then another customer brings it up and is like, “what do you mean this
laptop isnt 15.99?” We are not perfect. When an employee gets paid 7 dollars
an hour, the quality of that job done will be equivalent. Maybe its just me,
but i always cross reference the product with the upc on the price tag to
make sure its the right one. And the planners are always a mess, they all
look the same so its hard to tell what belongs at what price point,
especially if you are a stupid customer!
donde esta la video?
nevermind…I was accidentally on the school’s network (blocked) and not the cable modem
Um, you DO realize that Officemax has a strict IQ quota for it’s employees, right? Anyone with an IQ over single digits is automatically disqualified. And the WONDER why they are going out of business. Here in mASSachusetts, they don’t enforce item pricing laws because the retailers are in the legislators pockets (that is when the legislator isn’t out in a park somewhere groping women) the only way to get them enforced is to bring your own lawsuit
I love Greg and I love the Woody show. This is too funny =)
Once at a local dept store I found a quite nice lamp (for a dept store) with a price tag zip tied to it that said it was $15. It seemed roughly accurate so I grabbed one. The item rang up for $60, but after some arguing and me walking back with a manager, arguing some more, me taking a picture of the zip tied price tag, he finally agreed he’d honor the price. The tag was still on the lamp the next time I visited.
PS, The tag was zip tied to a display lamp, not the one I bought.
At a chain grocery store here if it rings in incorrectly the item is free + $1. If you buy multiples the first item is free + $1 and you get the difference on the rest.
I love Flash, because it helps me make my living, and makes animation a lot easier; I hate it because it enables any talentless douche to make shitty animated shorts.
God I hate bad animation.
OfficeMax isn’t going out of business, Office Depot is under SEC investigation, but I doubt they go under either.
In the case of the mouse, A customer reshelved it incorrectly. Sucks, but it does happen.
In the case of the calendar, they missed a price change.
Handlebar mustache was a douche bag.
Radio guy was a bigger douche bag.
At a Kroger several years ago, I bought a candy bar and it rang up for about twice its marked price. I went to the service desk, got a full refund, and walked out with the free candy bar. Next day I happened to notice it was still marked incorrectly, so I bought another one. Same lady at the service desk refunded my money. I suggested the really, seriously ought to fix the price. Day three, same thing. Day four, again, free candy. By this point, the folks at the service desk knew me by name and treated me like I was a freeloading thief. They were angry with me! By day five, the price was corrected.
The best thing you can do in the circumstance where the store refuses to honor a price that’s clearly marked on the product is to document it and threaten to take it to the AG. Stores do not have a right to change an advertised price under your nose. The next person who comes along trying to get the same deal, maybe, but not the person who found the screwup. Doc an employee’s salary if you have to.
Carrying around a digital camera seems to be more and more important these days…
Love the toon. This is the first time I’ve seen animation applied over talk radio like this, and I’d like to see more. Bless the Internet.
@hi: So are you saying that if gasoline were, say, $2.50/gallon you would do the honest, honorable thing and pay the correct price? Somehow I doubt it, Robin Hood. If I hear another jackass blame his own shiftiness, stupidity, or irresponsibility on $4 gasoline my head is going to explode.
I absolutely HATE these articles! Different states have DIFFERENT laws. While in California this may be the case, in most states the laws are DIFFERENT. I am tired of arguing with customers who think I have to mark something down because some other lazy person put a $100 item in front of a $3 tag (and yes, I am aware that the article states that the tags read the actual items name/sku, other people aren’t..)
(I even had one customer bring in the law with her arguing that she should get the item for free (where I live up to $20 if a consumer commodity rings up higher(not less! believe me.. I’ve seen it all..) you get one of that item free of charge.) because the tag was off by a dollar. (it was a toy cash register mind you!) (toys != consumer commodity)
Please, PLEASE, clarify…
A common mistake people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools. ~ Douglas Adams
@Pylon83: You certainly do seem to be an expert armchair lawyer…
Most, if not all states have some sort of consumer protection law that deals with scanners and shelf tags. If the “wireless mouse” tag did not have corresponding UPC numbers with the actual wireless mouse then what they did WAS against the law.
In WI, the AG threw a smack-down on KMart years back that forced them to pay the customer $3 (or the item free if under $3) for EVERY scanner mistake they had because they did this type of stuff CONSTANTLY.
I could be wrong here, but I thought it was the dept of weights and measures that handled pricing issues. I know that for produce, they get very picky about the scales being tared off correctly to account for the weight of the bags.
I was in Lowes recently, and I bought a paint roller extension handle. They had a bin of them at the end of the aisle, but the bin was poorly constructed and there were no clear deliniations between the models of handle, however there were several tags with different prices on them. So I took one out of the largest concentration of them, in front of a sign that said $3.99 or somesuch. It rings up $7.49. I informed the cashier of the problem and we walked over to the bin. She said “Oh well that must be for these other ones here..” pointing to a cheaper model than I’d picked. “Well,” I said, “Most of these (the one I’d picked” are grouped here behind the $3.99 sign, and since there are no separators in this bin, and this matches the description of what’s in here (paint roller extension handle) I’d suggest you either adjust the price in the computer, or call your manager over.” She gave me the stink eye, but she did change the price.
@DeeJayQueue: Both the law and the department that enforces it varies from state to state.
@rellog:
I notice how you provide no citation for this WI law, and you claim that “most, if not all” states have such laws, yet you provide nothing to back this up. I didn’t say that states don’t have such laws, what I said was not ALL States have them, thus Ben’s assertion that it was “Against the law” everywhere is over-broad and incorrect.
This same thing happened to me at my local Target. My wife and I went in to buy a grill with some left over gift cards from our wedding. The grill we wanted had a sale sign on it for $169.99, marked down from $199.99. We grabbed the sale ticket and went to check out, and the grill rang up at full price. I explained to the cashier that the sale sign said differently, so she called for a price check. The stock goon affirmed the price on the sign so she then called a manager over to change the price and he said that the sale price was expired and that the sign should have been taken down. I said that it was still on display and that I wanted the sale price. He walked back to the display and grabbed the sign, folded it up, and stuck it in his pocket. He told me that since the sale was over, he didn’t have to honor the price. I then told him that by law he was required to honor the price that was on display no matter when the sale ended. He then said that for all he knew, I printed up a fraudulent sale price and put it there myself. He then threatened to have me arrested for price switching. I told him to go ahead and call the cops and see what happens. By now, he and I are in a shouting match and my wife suggests that we just leave. She probably saved me from an assault arrest because I tend to get a little hot tempered when I am falsely accused of a crime.
It worked out though. We went back a few weeks later and there was a better grill on sale for the same price. We bought that one with no problems at all. Well, other than the cashier acting extremely annoyed when we paid for it with about 15 different gift cards ranging in value from $1.57 to $50. From the way she acted you’d have thought that I tried to pay with a big bag of unsorted change.
@ringo00: One quick way to get on the bad (read: unhelpful) side of a manager is to tell him something about his store is illegal. Somehow, I just bet that a national chain like Target puts “sale ends ‘date’” on their sale tags. This would then difine the parameters of the described pricing. Also, at many national chains, just mentioning “illegal” or “lawsuit” is a good way to get yourself booted out of a store. “If you intend to contact an attorney, then we can’t have this conversation, please leave my store now.”
listen to live 105.3fm every morning here in the SF bay area, pretty hilarious incident.
Certainly understandable the frustration the dude had…. especially after this happening two days in a row on two seperate items. Something is REALLY wrong with that store. WHether it is just employee incompetance or purposely done to trick customers into paying more just so the store can make more money has yet to be determined. However if it seems it is ALWAYS a mistake in the store’s favor then I’d lean more towards the latter.
Believe me…. I can relate. Nothing more frustrating than going to buy something on sale & then seeing that it is priced wrong once you pay for it. Feels like you are being scammed on purpose.
ANd there is NOTHING more annying than some pissant employee saying something like “oh, that must be a mistake” & then removing the price (like they are covering up their own incompetance/scamming).
@Pylon83: well, here’s the law in connecticut (pdf) –> [www.ct.gov]
in short – mismarked commodities under $20 are free (or if the error is in the customer’s favor, they get it for the scanned price). over $20, the retailer must give the customer $20 off, but the customer must ask.
here’s the thing: it only applies to commodities, or things that are used up over time. so, to relate to the video, i think the calendar would be free, but the mouse would not be, maybe?
@Hanke:
and this can obviously go the other way. The store that routinely puts a similar item in a lower priced item’s place & then charges more than advertised & then claims its a mistake when caught. Would make a wonderfull way for a store manager to improve his profit sheets.
Most places around here (even Home Depot and Home Outfitters and what not) seem to just.. change the price if they scan wrong and I say something. When I worked at Futureshop, there was a sticker on all our tills that said something to the effect of “If the item scans wrong, you will get the item free up to $10″.. we didn’t usually give the discount, but we did just change the price at the till and remove the old tag. It was company policy, as long as we called the manager when we did it, it was fine.
I think that anything not CLEARLY labeled as to its price should be free.
What the fark ever happened to PRICE TAGS?.
@Leohat
What happened to price tags? Companies got got tired of people switching 3.99 price tags onto 99.99 items.
T
@BeThisWay: well, that’s actually easily solved if companies are willing to make the investment -> [www.marginmate.com]
if you think of all the money lost in mispricing & all the time lost in pricing products overall (which equates to money when you consider the cost of labor), electronic shelf displays are quickly paid for.