Surprisingly, this is actually a deal, albeit a confusing one. The given sale price says 'unit price', which corresponds to the 9.49 on the original label.

I guess they dont want to calculate the sale price for each piece of meat, so they just put the new price per pound and hope you have a calculator

@Ninjastorm66: wait. I misread the label AND the article. Now I see the confusion...

    $6.64 a pound is a pretty good price for a strip steak. $9.49, not so much, unless you're at Whole Foods, where steak can easily run over $20 a pound.

    Now if they are taking a quarter-pound steak and calling it a pound, that's no good at all! A 0.47 pound strip is going to be MIGHTY thin!

I can't believe I made it through an entire article on confusing/misleading pricing without some smartass from Facebook complaining about why Consumerist wrote about it.

@mgy: It was only posted twenty minutes ago-give it time.

How easy is it to remove these labels and put them on another package of meat? We can't see what the original package label says the package contains. Maybe someone thought "Haha, it would be funny to switch up some of the tags".

Answers are extra.

But here's my guess -- it was actually supposed to be a sale, marked down from $9.49/lb. to $6.46/lb. But the clerk was sleepy and just leaned all over the scale while making up the new label.

@bluewyvern: $6.64/lb., rather. Damn, this is hard.

The simple solution is to inform one of the meat people that the tag is screwed up so they can print another one. Typically they will honor the lower price.

At one of my local supermarkets, there's redundancy between the deli and the checkout (at least the self-serve checkout) in that both weigh the item. And the weights are very, very different, and yes, they're higher at the checkout, where the actual price paid is determined. Funny about that.

@bluewyvern: Kind of hard to do that. The labels usually print out when the weight has normalized. So you toss the package on, and a second later, the label pops out. Pressing on a scale and keeping constant steady pressure is VERY tough to do.

I find it very odd that in the first picture, the UPC is like most meats. It contains the price in the UPS right before the check sum digit. In the second, it isn't. It would seem to me that this code would result in a manual price entry, which is unusual in meat products, as it lets "fraoud" into the picture.

@floraposte: What's the tare weight for the check out scale? Do all the scales have the proper sticker to verify they have been calibrated? Is the one at the deli for estimates only?

[is.gd]

1. Put away phone.
2. Head to the butcher/deli.
3. Request weight of/new label on steak.

Its got to be a sticker from another package - probably an employee placed it on it by mistake.

@settsu: What does this have to do with a novel about about people tricking people into admitting something? Are you saying the OP is lying? Then why don't you say it instead of trying to avoid calling the OP a liar outright?

How about getting BOTH stickers in the pic?

Theres 2 different UPCs on that steak. One is correct (presumably), the other is not. Also, unless this is some widespread thing then I don't feel like this is newsworthy. Mistakes happen.

According to the OP he was "buying a small NY strip steak at Food Lion the other day".
The other day? The price tag says May 7 - over 3 weeks ago.

Too bad the photo crops off the top the older tag. That would resolve many questions and assumptions.

@enthreeoh: In addition, I work in a grocery store and we use just the top labels on our meat, they print out of a scale.

@AcidReign: I'm pretty sure I've seen boneless ny strip steaks on sale at my store for $4.99/lb before, didn't think much of it...

@OGH!_GitEmSteveDave: And what of the packaging?

@OGH!_GitEmSteveDave: I think he meant that they are making much ado about nothing.

@OGH!_GitEmSteveDave: and they're 2 totally different upcs. The scales we use contain the item plu after 2 spaces into the upc, then at the end is the pricing data. ex: 20348410446 would mean that boneless ny strip is plu 3484.

As a Food Lion employee, i can explain what probably happened.

Every morning, our meat market worker for the day inspects the case and any steak that is nearing its sell by date( 1-2 days)gets marked down with the orange sticker. In order to do this, the machine that prints the mark-down scans the piece of meat, and prints out the sticker at 1/2 to 1/3 the original price.

In short, the meat market worker switched stickers accidentally. So someone walked away with a pound of steaks for about two dollars, while the OP got stuck with the higher priced package.

After my trip to the supermarket yesterday, I can see how easy it would be to put the wrong label on the wrong package. There is a 50% off bin at Lowes Foods, and I always check it before I finish shopping. This time, the guy was restocking it with some NY Strips. He had a Shopping cart full of meat and a hand held scanner, He would scan one, put it down, then scan another. After about 5 or so, he would reach into his cart and grab labels he just printed. Put them and the package together and go from there.

Doing it this way can easily lead someone to lose their place, especially when being asked for some help.

I am glad I stopped by this time, he was marking down chicken quarters next and the package I had in my cart was one of them.

I just see this as being a mistake, like setsu said, ask them to fix it.

@OGH!_GitEmSteveDave: Hmm. I don't know if they use tare weight at the deli or not--they were weighed after packaging, which is a little unusual around here, so now that you mention it, that could indicate that they did. The checkout scales don't use tare weight, for meat or produce--just raw weight of everything on them. That might be the difference right there--good call. And bad protocol. If the deli price was only an estimate, there certainly was no sign saying so.

I'll ask about tare weight next time I make the run to this supermarket.

@Trevor H.: Thanks, I was going to write that. My local supermarket does the same thing, marks down meat a couple days before the sell by date. Usually you get a better deal, though.

Mike should of brought the steak to the attention of the meat counter- they could of re-weighed it, and the price would of been about $3.12. They should honor the lowest price, since it's about to expire.

@verucalise: Also my supermarket doesn't re-price meats, they place stickers on them saying "$2 off" (usually it's between $1-$5) which can be removed and scanned at the register like a coupon. It's a much better system.

@thelushie: When I was a kid, I used to do that all the time. Of course then it was just fun and I didn't really realize what it was I was doing...

@IfThenElvis: When I am telling a story, the "other day" could have been 2 months ago...

@verucalise:

Until you have an employee who leaves a roll of the $2 off stickers out where a customer can find it and then slaps the sticker on every item she buys. Oddly enough, she admitted to it when I questioned her about why the "meat manager's special" stickers were on her Cheerios.

@wrjohnston19283: If your store bothered with making correctly coded coupons, then the customers couldn't get away with using a generic 2 dollars off coupon on anything other than a meat item. It's not that hard to make.

@trademarked67: I was never allowed to go grocery shopping with my mom or dad. Too much temptation for wrongdoing.

I was allowed to go to the corner market (about a block from my house as a kid) to buy my mom her cigarettes. Keep in mind that this was back in the early 80s. I still think it is funny that they would sell a 7 year old a pack.

The unit price is correct (about $3 off), the problem is the weight is wrong: .47lbs in the original and 1.06lbs in the discount. Bingo. It's either something on the scale that cut the new sticker or it's just the wrong sticker.

I've watched them weigh and sticker meat packages in my grocer's and they do the following:

a) line up the packages
b) drop one on the scale with left hand and hit button
c) catch the sticker on right thumb while removing package with left hand
d) repeat b & c until all fingers on right hand have a sticker
e) apply them to the weighed packages.

@verucalise: Hy-vee, I assume, or is this used elsewhere too?

@verucalise: That's what Hannaford does. And the coupons will only work if the system finds an applicable meat department item already rung up in the order. (Sometimes it would balk if, for example, the sticker was put on a package of hot dogs, which are under the grocery and not meat department.)

@thelushie: Wow, same here. A few door down from my house there was a market and my mom would send me there for cigarettes all the time. I was around 10 as well. Things were much different back then.

@bluewyvern: More likely, they were reducing more than one pack of steaks and just accidentally stuck this label on the wrong package. If it is anything like Wal-Mart (when they actually had meat departments versus prepackaged stuff), you can walk around with the handheld scanner/printer and just work your way down the case scanning the meat that only had 2-3 days left before trash. Then you'd get a long roll of stickers to stick on the packages. This just sounds like someone wasn't paying attention.

@Coles_Law: Price Chopper here in the Northeast.

@SabreDC: The wonders of the internet when a minimum wage employee accidentally placing one wrong sticker on one package of meat can keep surfers occupied for hours. If somehow we could could just harness this energy for more productive uses.

Would you guys seriously stop it with this dumb price mistake posts?

If this were a car, a large appliance, complicated professional services or something else likely to cause significant financial or social impact, great. Or a systemic mistake by a service provide is a good example of something to post.

But a price miSTEAK? C'mon!

Here's a thought to keep you up at night -- there are thousands of price mistakes every day that go unnoticed before or after the transaction. Are you missing all of them? Yes, and mainly because they are irrelevant.

Who would even think of buying meat at Food Lion? Yeech.

@enthreeoh: I can often get Prime Strip steaks on sale for $7.99-8.99 a lb, but the normal price is 17.99 - 18.99

It all depends on the grade of meat you are willing to spend on.

I have seen prime on sale for $8, and select at the regular price of $9...

Maybe another customer deliberately changed labels. I've seen it. I used to work at a Kroger back in high school and would call people out on it all the time. I usually let them go through anyway, but I would tell them I noticed.

Another thing customers do is steal the 50 cents off coupons off of certain items and put them on others. They are not coded to any specific item, so it is really easy to do.

I guess it just really helps to check all the labels before picking an item off the shelf...especially those priced by weight.

@enthreeoh: Comsumerist is going down hill with these types of stories. Misprinted stickers, a letter falling off a sign.

These are not widespread consumer problems, but simple mistakes any one of use could make.

sounds perfectly fine to me,
employee didn't care, look for one with a lower priced label and you're both happy

lol at anyone who thinks this is a gimmick to try to get someone to pay more

I work at a meat department at a grocery store and this stuff can happen all the time. Someone accidentally can put a wrong label on a package and no one might notice it.

Just bring it to a guy, and they'll probably charge you the lowest price possible, whether its the old weight at the new price, or whatever the deal is.

@thelushie: Ahhh the innocent days of the 80's. I too was sent to the local store to get my mom smokes. She always included a note with her number in case they wanted to check. After a couple calls they just knew my face and didn't bother calling home.