<http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/fun/retail.asp?date=20070405>
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Gotta plead guilty to saying "must be free," but what you young
whippersnappers don’t realize is that, back when they began this
barcode scanning, at least some grocery stores helped ease customer’s
minds with a policy that said, if it didn’t scan, it was free. They
quickly realized that, while this was a nice PR move if the customer
was buying a can of soup, it wasn’t such a good idea if the customer
was buying, say, a coffeemaker. However, there was a basis for people
saying, "So, that means it’s free, right?" even after the promotion
ended … because it had been such a bad idea to begin with.
Of course, it was never a policy in department stores that I know of.
And, perhaps as a result, the percentage of items not properly put
into the system was usually much higher. In most chain stories of any
type, nobody on site could input a new barcode — it happened at
corporate, so that these errors didn’t quickly correct themselves.
Baba Wawa and gang were quick to hype the notion that stores were
ripping people off, instead of simply saying, "Keep an eye on the
readout as you go, to make sure the code has scanned properly." Which
it sometimes hadn’t, but in the wake of their fearmongering, studies
tended to show that it was under about as often as over.
Incidentally, one of the changes to my move back to the country is
that our grocery store here doesn’t have a self-checkout lane. Just
when I’d taught myself to deal with defective barcodes!
Mike Peterson
http://nellieblogs.blogspot.com