I will never forget the worst grocery shopping blunder I ever made. Once every few months I stop by the fish and seafood counter and get some crab cakes. I buy the imitation crab meat cakes and when they are browned in extra virgin olive oil, they are every bit as delicious as those using the "real" crab meat.
The imitation crab cakes are generally medium in size and cost about $3.98 per pound. I commonly buy four of them at a time. That's pretty close to a pound and it's a great meal for less than five dollars.
I have this thing about shopping at new grocery stores so I found one in another town a few months ago and of course I had to go inside. The seafood counter was fabulous! The crab cakes were not $3.95, but $4.95 but they were larger than I usually buy and looked wonderful! So I decided to order six instead of four that time. $5 or $6 would be fine for such great looking crab cakes.
Enter the first problem. For some reason I still don't understand, I didn't watch the items going through the electronic price reader. I always monitor that with eagle eyes! But I didn't that day. The total seemed a bit high but that often happens at a new store when I find new and exciting products. I checked the sales slip after I got home all the same.
Bottom line is that my beautiful crab cakes were not $4.95 a pound, but $4.95 EACH and made with real crab meat. Anyone who has ever done such a thing will understand my horror when I saw that I had paid very nearly $30 for those crab cakes!
More recently my daughter wanted to buy quesadillas that were in a section that was marked with a price of $3.49. I saw when they went through the checkout that they came up on the monitor as $7.69. I don't know how prevalent this is, but I have learned that I need to watch even more closely when my order is being scanned.
One of my grocery stores (not the one where the quesadillas came from unfortunately!) gives the product free if it is scanned incorrectly. It is not only a good policy for the customers and prompts more people to watch the price scans as I do, but it is good for their workers, too, to make sure to code the products with the right prices to begin with. They will know who did the coding.
I got into this habit many years ago when I was still a kid. I remember my mother teaching me to watch prices by seeing her doing it. At that time the checkers had to punch everything into the computer or cash register by hand and it was very easy for "$27.00" to come up as a price instead of "$2.70" and mom always caught it.
"Excuse me, I think you may have added an extra zero to the price of that cereal, it came up as $27.00!" was almost a weekly occurrence back then. Now with the scanning I think a lot of people have become complacent about the matter and don't watch as often any longer. I have learned to remedy that and everyone should be aware of what they are actually paying for certain items that may be coded incorrectly.
