Brought to you by my discovery that some people think that “the customer is always right” isn’t the slogan of a long-dead department store, but rather it’s an actual call the cops law.

  • MobileSuitBagera@lemmy.fmhy.mlEnglish
    67·
    1 year ago

    Yay! I have one. We had a customer grab a product from a spot on the shelf next to where it was normally stocked. The spots have labels indicating the price of the item. This person argued that because the product was in the wrong spot they should only have to pay the price of the item that should have been there. The prices also include the name of the product. The reason the the product was taking up space in the next spot was because we had sold out due to the item being deeply discounted because we were discontinuing it. When we explained that they began accusing us of false advertising and threatened to call the better business bureau. They admitted that they knew it was the wrong product but insisted that because it wasn’t shelved in the right spot that was some kind of loophole. I gave a firm no and then they asked to speak to a manager. I fucked off it was taken care of.

    • SgtThunderC_nt@lemmy.zipEnglish
      34·
      1 year ago

      I also work front end, I’ve had sooo many people give me this shit.

      #1 Not advertising. Advertising is what you see before you enter the building. Some stores don’t even have shelf labels.

      #2 Do you think someone can walk up to your garage sale and slap their own sticker that says $1 and demand you sell them a TV for $1? No, you can refuse to sell your own shit whenever you want. It’s YOUR shit. You can burn it in front of them if you felt like it.

      • maynarkh@feddit.nlEnglish
        22·
        1 year ago

        Not really the case in most of the EU.

        It doesn’t count obviously if it’s a misplaced item and the price is clearly labelled for another item. However, if a store leaves discount stickers on some product late, or mislabels some price, they are obligated to sell at that price. There is caveat that it only works if the price is believable, but I managed to get a ton of shrimp that just arrived at a Lidl 90% off one time. Family was eating shrimp for weeks.

        • CrispyCactus @lemm.eeEnglish
          11·
          1 year ago

          My dad and I were shopping at Home Depot one December and found a small Christmas decoration I wanted. When we got it to the register the cashier couldn’t find a tag or sticker on it. Normally I’d go get another one with a tag but this was the only one they had. The cashier tried looking it up through the computer system but still couldn’t figure it out. She handed it to us and told us it was free because it was the store’s fault that she couldn’t find the price.

          We’ve been enjoying that decoration for years, my mom still puts it in the middle of her kitchen display. And we always remember how nice that cashier was to us.

        • pandarisu@lemmy.worldEnglish
          3·
          1 year ago

          I used to work in a supermarket in the UK about 20 years ago. The store is not legally required to sell anything to anyone (as long as it’s not because they are discriminating against a protected characteristic), so the workaround for the store was to say that the item was no longer for sale and to remove it from the shop floor (presumably fixing the labeling, then putting the stock back out)

        • Flygone@lemmy.mlEnglish
          3·
          1 year ago

          Where in the EU would that be the case?

          AFAIK a legally binding contract only happens once you actually exchange money for a product. That should be true pretty much all over the world as long as there’s actual laws/customs regulating this process.

          Any prices/offers or whatever else you might see in or around a store are in no way legally binding no matter how believable the prices are.

          Otherwise anyone can just run around with a 10/20/50% off sticker and force any store to sell them whatever they want for much cheaper.

          • SWW13@lemmy.brief.guruEnglish
            6·
            1 year ago

            At least in Germany that’s the case.

            Every contract is legally binding in Germany, even verbal contracts or in this case price tags (to some degree). Obviously other laws may invalidate them and verbally is hard to prove. For example if you advertise onetime off prices for a week to lure people in the store you have to have a reasonable amount of these items to be available through the week, otherwise people are eligible to get the offer or compensation.

            Adding your own sticker would probably be fraud and easy to prove for the store (not matching sticker, no plans to reduce prices, …).

          • maynarkh@feddit.nlEnglish
            2·
            1 year ago

            Otherwise anyone can just run around with a 10/20/50% off sticker and force any store to sell them whatever they want for much cheaper.

            Or they can just steal it, it’s just as legal. In my experience this is law in a lot of the EU, including Germany and a bunch of Eastern European places.

            In my case, it wasn’t a misplaced 90% off sticker, it was just that the normal price tag on the shelf was printed with one zero less. It was also a “premium” item at the time, so the price wasn’t that much off, just cheap. It wasn’t just a bunch of shrimp, it was ready made, cleaned, arranged into a neat circle with dipping sauces in the middle.

            On the other hand, I had a thing where Microsoft was introducing Skype to a country where the local currency was around 200:1 to the dollar. They messed up the currency conversion, and it defaulted back to 1:1, giving everyone a 99.5% discount on consumer electronics. It was obviously not honoured, and the law was clear, so no lawsuits either.

    • TauZero@mander.xyzEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      Here’s example language from New York City law:

      All consumer commodities … shall have … a sign at the point of display which indicates the item to which the price refers, provided that this information is plainly visible at the point of display for sale of the items so indicated.

      So it is a question of whether the product spilling over to an adjacent shelf still has a “plainly visible” price tag. If it were on a wrong shelf entirely it would not, and here there is some ambiguity, but city inspectors can be pretty strict and demand items stay within the lines. If it is decided the price was not plainly visible, the store may be fined $25-$100 per violation per day. In any case, the customer would not be calling “better business bureau” (which is just yelp from before the internet), but the Commissioner of Department of Consumer and Worker Protection. And the customer would also not get to pay the lower price for the other product if it is clear it is a different product, as the customer admits they knew. (The question would be different if there were ambiguity).

      However, the point that I specifically object to is the opinion that it was preposterous for the customer to claim some legal right in this situation, the implication that no such right exists. The language of the law does exist (at least in some jurisdictions), and violations do carry legal penalties.