Apparently the customer is not always right!

[crispykreme]

I was shopping the other day and my ds spotted a LEGO pack. A little bag with a Disney character in. As he's been really well behaved and never usually asks for anything I said he could get it.

The price on the shelf ticket said ' Disney blind bag £1.20' .

He spend the rest of the time I shopped looking at the bag and feeling to see if he could guess what one it was. He was so excited.

Got to the till, scanned LEGO bag and it comes up at £4.50!

I knew LEGO can be expensive but there was no way I could pay that much as we are low on money at the moment.

I asked the cashier if she could get someone to double check the price as I was sure it was £1.20.

Someone came back with the ticked that said Disney blind bag £1.20. Apparently as it was still scanning at £4.50 that is the price it was.

Now usually if that happened the shop would sell to me at the ticketed price. Customer always right ?

I had to refuse the item and leave poor ds near to tears. I promised I would get him one for his birthday or at least when our money situation is better.

Aibu to have expected it for the price clearly stated on the ticket?

@Hushabusha

Hang on - so a shop could have all their items marked on the shelves for £1 then when the customer goes to pay charge them any amount and say oops it's priced wrong??

Well, technically yes, but any shop that did that wouldn't last very long.

The price on the shelf is an invitation to buy. You don't have to pay that price if you don't want to, you're free to walk out and buy elsewhere.

In my old job (clothing) everything was hand-priced with an old-fashioned pricing gun. It was easily done to miss-place a decimal point or forget a zero. But if someone accidentally priced a £200 jacket for £20, we're not exactly going to say the customer can have it anyway, and we'll just miss out on £180.

Lots of shops will have shelves with promo items on - meal deals, for example. But customers often put things back in the wrong places and therefore not everything on a meal-deal shelf is always part of a meal-deal. That's why at the till, the price is shown on screen and the total is confirmed before the customer pays. At that point, you can then choose to pay (or not).

They were being mean for the sake of £3, most shops would have honoured the marked price but it could be that the the shop assistant couldn’t override without a supervisor/manager and that none were available.

I must say, at the start if all this COVID debacle I'd received a regular shopper advertised specials email with the disinfectant I buy a lot of reduced from $6 to $2.50. I grabbed a few bottles like I usually do when it goes on scale and at the register it scanned at full price. I showed the operator my email (joys of phones these days!) and when she clicked on the item it was full price, but email price didn't change. The store honoured the email price. I was really happy and for the sake of a few $$ it bought goodwill from me.

The phrase used to be 'an invitation to treat', meaning that you couldn't demand the ticketed price and I'm sure that the law is still the same. I once picked up an item at £6 in Sainsburys, it came up as £18, the manager and I went back to the shelf, only one item of it's type ticketed at £6. Apparently there had been the more expensive one ticketed and a cheaper item on the shelf but as the mistake was their's she let it go through at £6 and comped a bottle of wine I had!
Bad customer service from Lego.
'Customer is always right' is the dumbest motto ever though!!!

The law was clarified a while back due to a spate of customers taking advantage by ticket switching to get cheaper prices.

Isolated cases of mispricing are reasonably expected and a lot of companies will allow the overide as a good will gesture however they don’t legally have to as it is only an agreed transaction when you pay. Some tills don’t allow staff to do so as they could be accused of giving friends and family freebies. They have he right to withdraw the item from sale to rectify the issue and at the prices you are talking about it may have been the item would be selling at less than cost and therefor they might not have been able to adjust that far.

In terms of deliberate mispricing @Hushabusha this becomes a trading standards issue. For example she walked in 3 days later and it was still clearly advertised as the same price but if the store had taken the opportunity to rectify the issue they would accept that the store had done all they could. It has to be a deliberate and continuous false representation.

On the flip side it sucks!

Many customers take great delight in finding wrongly priced items, or even switching the price tickets themselves and then making a fuss to 'demand' that the retailer honours the 'wrong' price.

Yes, the ones who follow dozens of bargain hunter blogs. And harass small businesses online if they thought they were going to nab a piece of free gluten free cake and it didn't happen because the business couldn't fulfill thousands of requests from cheeky fuckers

Those people have ruined it for the honest. I'm sorry your little boy missed out.

Nope they are not.
Piss poor customer relations though.

If the ticket said so they’re at fault, so should’ve discounted the item to reflect the ticket.

However, it is their discretion

The phrase "the customer is always right" refers to a customer knowing what they want to buy. A customer is right about what they want, and companies should make products and services to meet their desires / needs.

The phrase does not mean you should get your own way in all situations involving a difference of opinion about pricing, returns etc.

In my experience, the customer is more often wrong than right but they get away with it for an easy life

In my experience, the customer is more often wrong than right but they get away with it for an easy life

Exactly 👍

It seems crazy that you can advertise one price and not have to sell it for that much. Imagine people doing their weekly shop, they probably wouldn't notice at the time if a few of the items scanned at 4 x the price. I bet some shops would try that deliberately.

This EXACT thing happened to me in Sainsburys with a Lego mini figure and we'd picked up three. They were really though, checked the label and honoured the amount due. They removed all the other labels at the same time too.

They aren't allowed to advertise a deliberately misleading price. However if a mistake happens they can either refuse to sell to you or they can sell at the lower price. What they can't do is demand the higher price from you. And they should go and fix the shelf label.

The shop does not have to sell you the item at the lower price but they are commiting an offence by displaying a lower price to what they intend to charge.
I would have asked to speak to a manager and, if you were still not satisfied, called Trading Standards.

This happened to me with a hair product ticketed half price £30 came up at £60 they had forgot put the ticket tout of the sale as it had been half price! But was back up to £60 they honoured it though at £30 sainsburies

Depends how you reacted. Usually they have the ability to sell it at the ticket price but if the customer is being an arse they probably won't.

As pp has said, legally they don't have to sell for that price.

The price is an invitation to treat which basially means it's an indication that, if you offered the shop £1.20 for that item, they would accept the offer. But they don't have to.

By following the normal purchase process (e.g. taking it to the till) you are offering the shop the ticket price for the item.

If the shop accepts your money they are accepting the offer - and it becomes legally binding. Until that point, you can both withdraw from the arrnagement.

Often shops honour a mistaken price in the spirit of goodwill - they accept your offer of a lower price than they wanted. But not always.

For the small sum of £3 this shop should probably have just accepted the lower amount to avoid the feeling of badwill that comes with a child not getting the toy they wanted

They may not have legally needed to sell it to you for this price but morally and to provide good customer service, they should have.

However, customers are definitely not always right...having a customer service job will teach you that Some customers are aggresive and rude; they are definitely not always right.

Nope the customer is hardly ever right. Most customers are entitled pricks.

If the price on the shelf is a genuine mistake and has been overlooked by a member of staff then they have no legal obligation to sell it at the price on the label. As a gesture of goodwill most companies will give you it at the price on the label and then get the label changed ASAP. When I worked in retail I would happily give them it at the price on the shelf as long as they were nice and polite about it but if they were a prick from the start spouting their consumer rights then there was no chance they were getting it at the marked price.

The majority of the time the customer had looked at the wrong label anyway so it was there fault.

God I don’t miss retail.

You win some, you lose some! It would have been nice of them to allow it, but hey ho.

I found some Carvela shoes in the sale at HoF for £20, got to the till and they weren't supposed to be in the same. Lots of debate between staff but eventually they decided to give them to me for £20. However, don't think they were obliged to.

Customer is always right is about making the customer feel they're right where possible. I could see this being abused if it became policy.

When I worked in a shop people would put reduced yellow stickers on th wrong items.

The customer is rarely right!! The customer is usually complete and utterly wrong.

However, if it’s priced incorrectly they should have sold it to your for that price and removed all others from the shelves for 24 hours before restocking at the right price.

The problem with honouring these mistakes is how online communities chasing these issues. There was a one off code on card readers the other day on one and hundreds of posters were “disgusted” the company wouldn’t honour it. I’m sure they weren’t all a business that would need one. Another today with folk annoyed they won’t get their top soil for 50p.

Actually next were very good when the matching footstool to my chair went in the for sale section

It was in the 75% off area but shouldn’t have been and nobody could Figure out what the sale price should have been

They could have stuck to their guns and said it was Full price or only partly reduced

I did do some hard core grovelling and begging though

Yabu, and of course the customer is not always right .