Paul F. Ritzenthaler, St. Joseph
It’s been happening with regular occurrence. I go into a grocery store, order the products that are advertised as being on sale and upon checking my receipt, find I have been overcharged for an item that was advertised as being offered at a lesser price.
I will, if you have the time to read on, give you five such situations. The most recent encounter I had was in St. Joseph. I planned to purchase that most staple of all staples – toilet paper. I found the product being advertised as “on sale” for $1.98 was not in stock. There was, however, another brand that was being offered in lieu of what I wanted. When I asked for a rain check, I was told it could not be issued because there was a replacement item I was “obligated” to purchase. The difference between the brand I sought to purchase and what was being offered as a replacement was something akin to a BMW versus a golf cart. Since I was in need of that most basic staple, I elected to suffer the consequences and defer to the lesser of bathroom evils. Let’s face it, dinner napkins sitting next to the privy just doesn’t bode well. And, alas, I don’t get the Sears catalog anymore.
After purchasing said secondary choice and submitting my coupon, I discovered the price of the product I purchased had swelled to $3.98. When I objected, I was told the price had increased because the product was of greater value than what I initially had intended to purchase. When I asked for my coupon back, I was told that because it had been applied to my purchase it was no longer available to me. Can you say “bait and switch?” Can you see dinner napkins next to your toilet? Let me, if I may, review some other situations.
Same corporation, different store name, same staple, same scenario – i.e. BMW versus golf cart – BUT, at least they corrected the problem after I vehemently complained while standing in the fast checkout line. This time, the dinner napkins were spared. But, I was not loved by a lot of fast checker-outers. At this other location (in St. Cloud), I was overcharged for a bottle of tomato juice because the price indicated on the signage in front of the product had not been changed (my fault, I guess for not being a sign mindreader). Same store, different day: frozen vegetables, SELECTED VARIETIES! Don’t you just love selected varieties? Some “unselected varieties” just happened to be mixed in with “selected” in the selected-varieties area. For that faux pas, I was charged double the amount on said unselected that I selected; and not allowed to use my “selected coupon” because I didn’t have enough of “selected.” It does get complicated, doesn’t it? I left groceries sitting in the fast-checkout lane and took the time to get enough “selected” to make the coupon valid. Once again, I was not loved by the lady behind me, who was in a hurry to check out her 18 or so items in the lane that says “approximately 8 items or less.” But, that’s another story.
Finally, not once, not twice, but on three occasions in the last three months, coupons I had submitted were not swiped (or, if they were, they didn’t register). Oh yes, once again, I made a lot more friends in the checkout line.
So why this extensive missive about grocery-store blunders? Well, let us just suppose that said grocery store (or stores) make a $1 error in their favor for every 10 (or even 20) purchases. In the course of a day, they can “clean up” on aisle four and every other aisle to the tune of hundreds of dollars – if not thousands – at the cost of you and me. May I suggest you check your receipts and react accordingly if you have been bamboozled by a store that has a lot more money to play with than you or me. Am I the Don Quixote of self-defense against a corporate conglomerate? No, I am not alone. Consider the following:
I know of a gentleman – let’s call him Mr. G – who lives and works in the Sartell/St. Joseph area and refuses to purchase anything from this unnamed grocery store because of more than one purchasing issue he had with “unnamed.” He drives out of his way to make his purchases because of the way he was treated by that store. He refuses to step through the front door of that store.
Most recently, an elderly couple that were in front of me in the checkout line at one of the aforementioned grocery stores noticed they too had an issue regarding a coupon. The lady apologized to me for holding up my purchasing activities, to which I replied, “God bless you.”
Please take time to take these market-money magicians to task, because the more they get away with ignoring these serious issues, the less they will do to resolve this problem.