Dollar-stores overcharge customers while promising low prices

I don't think the laws of the specific jurisdiction matter. In every US jurisdiction, the prices aren't completely legally binding (what if the previous customer changed the price tag?). In ~every US jurisdiction, if you systematically show one price but charge customers another, that's an offence.

So intent matters. What would decide an individual case is not the exact characterisation of the laws on the books, but how sympathetic a regulator or a judge is to the supermarket's claim that these things just happen sometimes.

I wish I could be surprised and I can see this happening in many places. This type of 'fraud' was predicted when we allowed the stores to stop marking items with the price.

Many places were I shop, hardly any products are lined up with the price attached to the shelves, plus the descriptions of some items are confusing due to the multiple names for the same thing.

Time to force stores to mark each item with the price once again.

> When on earth did we get into a world where that absolutely fundamental most basic task is now too burdensome to do with accuracy?

It always has been this way since barcoded stock keeping units because of the problems identified by CAP Theorem [0]. Since the price data of an object must exist in two locations, shelf and checkout, the data is partitioned. It is also relatively expensive to update the shelf price since it depends on physical changes made by an unreliable human. Even if all stores used electronic price tags there will a very small lag, or a period in which prices are unavailable (or a period of unavailability like an overnight closure).

It would be interesting to understand at what point of shelf/checkout accuracy would lead to what increases in overall prices [1]. That is to say that pricing information has a cost: a buyer must bring the item to checkout to find out the true cost in the case of authoritative checkout, or the clerk must walk to each shelf in the case of authoritative shelf.

Once upon a time, each item in the store was labeled with a price tag and the clerk typed that tag into a tabulation device in order to calculate tax and total. The advent of the bar code lead to shelf label pricing since the clerk needn't read a price from each item, leading to the CAP Theory problem of today.

I suppose that the future will bring back something similar to individual price tags in the form of individual RFID pricing. This way each individual item on a shelf can be priced in a way that is readable by the buyer and the seller in the same manner.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAP_theorem

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_efficiency

Massachusetts has a quite prominent law against this.

"When buying groceries—food and non-alcoholic beverages, pet food or supplies, disposable paper or plastic products, soap, household cleaners, laundry products, or light bulbs—you must be charged the lowest displayed price, whether on the sticker, scanner, website, or app.

If the lowest price you saw for an item is $10 or less, and that lowest price is not what you were charged or not what appeared on the in-aisle price scanner, the first item should be FREE. If the lowest price you saw for an item is more than $10, and that lowest price is not what you were charged or not what appeared on the in-aisle price scanner, you should receive $10.00 off the first item."

https://www.mass.gov/info-details/consumer-pricing-accuracy-...

Not to say it's not happening in a Mass based Dollar Stores but you could be walking away with a lot of free stuff and it would be enough of a deterrent to stomp out the practice. I've had it happen at grocery stores usually at their suggesting.

Spices are pretty much universally horribly overpriced at grocery stores.