Pricing errors happen. That’s a fact of retail. What we’ve never been able to understand, though, is why they happen so often at Target, and why that store tends to make the same errors over and over: specifically, pricing items so you pay more when you buy in bulk, and posting “sale” signs with higher prices than the original price.

One person shouldn’t be able to wander into a store and easily spot two of these errors during the same shopping trip, let alone notice them on the same aisle. Yet that’s what John did, and he took pictures of these two classic examples for us.

I’ll take two boxes of five bars, please.

The interesting question here is which price Target would actually charge: John wasn’t buying this item, so he didn’t check.

Five years ago, a Target employee wrote in to explain why the chain’s pricing appears to be so crazy, and how to deal when there’s an illogical price on something that you want to buy.

“That goes for anything. If you see something marked as one price, and it scans or rings up wrong, you can tell someone and have the price corrected,” the anonymous employee told us. “It’s best to find someone on the sales floor to clear it up instead of waiting until the cash register, because the cashier is going to call the sales floor anyway.”

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