To err is human

At the grocery store yesterday: Checked my receipt and found an overcharging error. I should go to the customer service desk to get my money back, and probably get the item for free, but the line is four deep and I don't have time to wait for a buck and a half. They win again.

A couple of decades ago, when I lived in southern California, I saw a TV report that found that a reporter who purchased a typical market basket of goods found errors at 23 of the 25 supermarkets visited (or some similar number). Since then, I usually try to check the receipt, and more often than not will find an error, even in this age of electronic scanning. So when Stop and Shop overcharges me, which is about half of the time (better than it used to be), if I notice it, I have to decide whether it's worth the trouble to do something about it. What is remarkable is that in the literally hundreds of error incidents, the error has never, not even once, been in my favor. Admittedly, managing price changes for so many items is difficult, and I probably buy sale items more than most, so errors are more likely for the things I buy, but I suspect my experience is hardly unique. Businesses complain how much they lose to shrinkage, waste, and the like, but I wonder how much extra they make on these undiscovered and unrecovered overcharges of consumers. As usual, caveat emptor.