Watch merchandise at register to make sure sale price rings up

Are you watching as your merchandise gets rung up at the register? One major drugstore chain recently had to pay a fine for inadvertently ripping people off when sale items weren’t correctly inputted into their system.

I am pretty obnoxious at the register (big surprise, right?) because I watch the cashier like a hawk. I was at a convenience store in San Antonio on Friday where I got bottled water for my executive producer Christa and Coke Zero for me. Both items rang up wrong with an overcharge of $3 in total.

So I pointed this out to the cashier. If looks could kill, I would still be dead on the floor! The cashier was upset that I caused a void on his register. But it was my money and I wanted it back!

The funny thing was they had these big signs in the store advertising the sale price on my items, but the register required that each sale be manually entered with a code before it could be scanned to get the correct sale price to come up.

This is an all too often occurrence. You buy something on sale and it doesn’t ring up at the sale price. It happens all the time at small business and all the big chains.

CVS agreed to pay a multimillion dollar fine to settle a consumer protection lawsuit on overcharging in California. The drugstore chain will pay civil penalties and more. As is so often case in these kinds of settlements, CVS did not admit any wrongdoing, but it agreed to put procedures in place for three years to see that customers are not being overcharged any more.

The Los Angeles Times reports that CVS will have undercover shoppers going into store to see you’re rung up correctly. They’ll also institute a “Scan right” policy where you’ll get $2 off the price of an item if it rings up at the wrong price. That’s a twofer for you: Just by paying attention to the register, you get the right price and a $2 bounty!

The truth is computerized registers are wrong on sale prices all the time at all kinds of retailers. If you buy something on sale and you don’t get the sale price, that’s a double whammy.

What I do is before everything is rung up, I have everything unloaded on the belt. If I’m in a supermarket, I get in front of the cart and unload everything so I can watch as it is rung up. Yes, I’m extreme on this, but this is something I believe you should be extreme on.

Do you have money to throw away right now?