EdwardTking
Deity
My experience in England is that chain store cashiers really hate being told that they have made a mistake. If they have over charged you, then they try to put up with it; but if they have under charged you; they are really annoyed, think that you are stirring up trouble, maybe you are a management spy. They can get very nervous if they think their supervisor can hear you.
I've been to a restaurant near where I work for lunch five days a week and had the same combination of food and drink on three days, but been charged 3 varying amounts; and no they have not changed the menu price midweek.
Now let us suppose that one price was correct, one an over charge, and one an under charge. Well according to your 'thieves' logic then, the restaurant has stolen from me once and I have stolen from them once. I find that silly.
My policy is to ignore over or under charging if it is only a modest amount.
I am slightly hard of hearing and often have to ask others to repeat themselves so conversations over trivial amounts in noisy places can be very tedious.
And the legal position is much less clear 'thieves' than you imply.
(i) A store puts goods on its shelves which is an invitation to treat.
(ii) I put a number of goods in a supermarket trolley and go to a payment point. Now I may have estimated what the total should be, but my mental arithmetic is not perfect and unmarked reductions or cross discounts may apply that I have not noticed so I can not know for sure what the total is and I am therefore not, in UK law at least, making a final offer.
(iii) The cashier runs them across a bar code scanner and then quotes
me a total price. I regard that as their final offer.
(iv) I unequivocally accept that price and pay, thereby executing the contract.
I have therefore bought the goods at the contracted price so there is
no question of thievery.
Compare this with people who have bought goods over the Internet because they are very cheap (because the wrong price was typed in the database).
The general case law is that unless the price was so absurdly low, that the buyers must have realised it was a mistake, the contracted price stands.
If the store's computer system has miscalculated the price and
thereby its final offer, and I am not in any way responsible, then that
is not my liability. They are not paying me to serve as backup totaller.
Remember many chains stores have all sorts of complicated offers,
(typically designed to confuse customers, encourage impulse buying
and distract from rational comparisons) designed by marketeers who
may want to dump surplus stock, often built into their computer systems and
one can miss the offer posters. Sometimes the staff at the checkouts don't know.
These offers vary from: Buy two, get one free. If you buy the electronic
fire alarm, batteries are half price or free. If you spent so much
last week, there is a discount this week. If you buy three books,
then one (but which one?) is half price. Now if such complexity
defeats their IT systems or bewilders their staff, who is to blame?
Uhr, it is certainly not me.
Now if there is a long queue behind and I say, hold on; you are charging
me £24.98 and I calculated it to be £25.97; then there is often a deathly silence, sometimes interrupted by a curse, disgruntled muttering and,
according to my luck, the bloke or old lady right behind me in the queue
may decide to ram me in the legs with their shopping trolley, because
they quite reasonably regard me as wasting the whole queue's time.
'Thieves' is a totally unwarranted accusation to fling at us CivFanatics.
