Grocery stores have a hard time pricing

My local City Market is probably like many City Markets, and many other supermarkets, in that every week they change the prices on thousands (probably tens of thousands) of items.  When they raise the price, it's often accompanied with a larger sticker that screams in red letters, "Low Price!"  They rarely lower the price, but often have sales.  Every week they put many items on sale, and a week or two later, those same items go off of sale price (or switch to a different sale price).  I have no idea why they do this.  Some of the sale items reflect promotions from the manufacturers, but the rest are a mystery.

The biggest problem with their frequent re-pricing is rampant mis-pricing.  Either they forget to enter the new price (or sale price) into the computer, or they forget to remove the sale price tag.  Either way, there's hardly a week that I don't get an incorrect price at check-out.  Now if I'm lucky, the friendly U-Scan clerk will void my item and I get it free.  If I'm not lucky, I have to stand in line at the customer service desk to get my item refunded.  If I'm really unlucky, I get a new employee who doesn't know the store policy (and has no interest in finding out what it is), and I'll be given an excuse instead of  refund.  "We forgot to take down the sign."  So?  That's not my fault.  Honor the posted price.  

Here's a story from The Consumerist (one of my favorite websites) that offers a partial explanation:

Odds are that you’ve been overcharged at some point in your life. Mistakes happen. The big question is: Is there any acceptable level of overcharging?
This is what we’re left wondering after seeing the latest investigation by CBS 5 in San Francisco into an apparent overcharging problem at Safeway stores.
As we told you about in November, undercover reporters were not only being overcharged at Safeway stores, but many of these stores were in violation of a court order requiring them to either give the customer the overcharged item for free or a $5 gift card.
A new investigation of various inspection records found that customers are overcharged on 1 out of 50 items purchased at a Safeway or Safeway-owned store (including Vons, Dominick’s Finer Foods, Randall’s and Tom Thumb).
Safeway counters that this rate of overcharges is “squarely within industry norms,” and cites the California Dept. of Food & Agriculture’s 2011 Statewide Price Verification Survey. Indeed, that survey [PDF] did find a statewide average of 1.97% in overcharges for all the retail businesses surveyed. Grocery stores demonstrated a slightly higher rate (2.15%) but still close to the 1-in-50 number CBS 5 found for Safeway.
“[W]e would never be satisfied with just being average when it comes to pricing accuracy,” writes Safeway in response to the CBS report, adding, “indeed, we are confident that our actual performance is even better than the 98% accuracy rate you attribute to Safeway.”
Safeway attributes the pricing errors to the large variety of items it sells. A rep for the Federal Trade Commission tells CBS that while “complexity creates problems… you know you don’t need to be NASA or the CIA to figure out how to get the prices right.”
It’s worth pointing out that grocery stores were not even the worst overchargers in the Price Verification Survey. Auto parts and supply, health and nutrition stores, postal and office supply, electronics and appliances, and drug stores all demonstrated higher rates of overcharging customers.
Safeway claims that has a “strict set of policies and systems” to minimize pricing errors, including self-auditing of stores. And yet it’s been sued twice in the last decade by the state of California for overcharging. So either it’s not doing enough or there is a limit to how accurate grocery stores can be.
What’s more important — and more easily remedied — is how stores train employees to handle overcharges. As demonstrated by November’s undercover report, workers and managers at the Safeway stores involved were either unaware of or misinformed about the company’s court-ordered policy of refunds for overcharged items.
Not only should every employee from the manager on down be fully versed in this policy, it should actually be the policy at stores regardless of whether or not the court has ordered it. Minor penalties to the store coupled with rewards for observant customers can only help.

Nobody says you have to change prices every week!

My local City Market (Kroger) is the only supermarket in town.  Having a monopoly, they don't really try.

Not only are their prices 50% higher than the very same items at Target (about twelve miles away), but they seem overly challenged by the most basic tasks, such as stocking shelves, rotating stock, ordering condiments (they usually wait until they've completely run out before thinking about ordering more), and training of employees.  There's a handful of older employees who have lots of seniority and great benefits, the new ones rarely last long.

Today, however, I want to talk about their sale prices.  Except for those things I buy every week, I usually wait until something like rice, olive oil, tea, coffee, or paper goods go on sale before buying them.  Even among the meat and produce I buy every week, I'll allow sales to influence my buying decisions.

So it's very frustrating when I see a sale price, load up the cart, and then don't get the posted price at checkout.  There are two main reasons for this.  Either the item's sale price wasn't entered in their computers properly, or the sale ended, but nobody bothered to take down the sign.  It's the latter that really bothers me.  Because I either have to tell the cashier (or U-scan supervisor) to correct the price, or I need to go wait in line at customer service after my purchase to get a refund.  Either way takes up time.  You would think that all they need to do is walk back to the place the item was, look at the sign, and return.  Yet for some reason, they walk away and you wait so long, you wonder if they're ever coming back.

It is Kroger's policy that if you don't get the posted price, you get the first item free, and the rest at the posted price.  That's if the employee knows the policy.  I had one young lady tell me that the sale expired and refused to do anything about it.  I insisted she contact her supervisor, who told her to give me the difference between the posted price and that which I paid, and I had to e-mail Kroger customer service to get the rest of my refund.

Now you might take the side of the store, and say "but they change prices on thousands of items every week, how can you expect them to avoid mistakes?"  My answer is that nobody asked them to change prices every week.  It's their decision.  And if that's what they want to do, they ought to do it right.  Also, given that nearly every week (and sometimes two or three times a week), I buy something and do not get the sale price, how many items are they goofing up?  My purchased items reflect a small percentage of the items they carry.  If I encounter problems every week, that means that hundreds, if not thousands of items are incorrectly priced at any given time.

Now lately I've been making my fruit purchases based on sales.  Why pay $2/pound for apples when you can get them for $1/pound?  But when the sale is over, they rarely take down the sign.  Yesterday I saw that the apples I bought last week still had the sale price, even though the "end date" was three days earlier.  I pulled the sign out of the holder and handed to an employee, saying "this sale is over."  Later, when I was checking out, she told me the sale was still effective.  I didn't want to argue with her about proper labeling of signs, but then she went further and told me not to remove the signs but to point them out.  I asked her if it was inconvenient for her to have to replace them, and asked her if she thought it was equally inconvenient for me to have to wait in line at customer service every week because they can't keep their signs current.

Interestingly enough, this morning they had a sale sign next to their fish sandwiches.  They make a good breakfast, so I grabbed a couple and didn't get the sale price at checkout.  The same employee who made a fuss the day before was working the U-scan, so it was with great pleasure (and some annoyance) that I told her I wasn't getting the posted price.  I had to wait several minutes for her to walk back to the deli, then come back up front, then push a bunch of buttons, but I finally got the right price.  I thanked her and she said nothing.  I hope she appreciated that my point was proven.