Fraud in(is) the model; retail chain grocery.
Certain retail grocery chains, through policy and procedure can under the claim of inefficiency and human error, ‘accidentally defraud’ hundreds of customers per chain location a day. This can for some of these retail operations add up to 10’s of thousands of ‘petty frauds’ 1–3 on average per victim, for an average of $2–7 dollars a time. Do the math, $10x10,000 = $100,000 a day. that would be 100 locations and 100 insults per store.
Now the method of this is quite simple, and requires a three step process for it to effectively work; the first is that a printed sale price sign can be printed without being integrated with the retail price at the checkout system. Smart stores print and change prices simultaneously.
2. If and when customer notes that sale price is not reflected when sale item is scanned, the employee must, call management and pause retail process holding up line, now apparently at the fault of the customer. The longer the line the greater the social pressure to concede simply to continue the process or in the future reduce the likelihood that they will dispute the price. Either way it costs time and efficiency a penalty to the customer being robbed.
3. A Manager must go out onto the retail floor and confirm that the customer is telling the truth. This takes additional time and when the customer is finally validated the entire line of people have been socially trained and penalized for questioning prices.
The whole ‘Fraudulent process’ could be nipped off at either of two places, and both at once is best. First off sale in store ads print out the price as is on the checkout database, if that is incorrect it is caught and identified at printout before posting publicly on display. Two when a customer questions a price, a challenge copy of the reciept is made and the customer is IMMEDIATELY BELIEVED, price is adjusted and checkout process is continued. This does allow customers to ‘game’ the system but respects the vast majority of legitimate challengers. In the end either wrong product sign for product displayed, or wrong data on check out will be discovered to be the problem. This copy file can be sent to float stock and staging personnel who can check and correct the issue.
All Grocery retailers who continue this process after I send you a copy — link email to this letter take notice, you cannot continue to defend either practice not being implemented, the loss of millions of undeserved profits from either unsuspecting, or harried and undisputing victims, is irrelevant you didn’t earn it, you stole it, by accident or on purpose the crime is real.
I would suspect since many retail chains have policies such as suggested in the most recent paragraphs that those who do not, do not, ‘accidentally on purpose’ in order to ‘glean’ that dropped money through ‘petty fraudulent transactions due to persistent policies of negligence’ its not insignificant, one retailer I know of who behaves this abyssmally and arguably inspired this article, has 81. Another, Aldi, trusts your challenge, and immediately adjusts the price and continues the checkout arguably three times faster than any other retailer on earth. But back to the point we consumers are no longer unaware of this insidious and unfortunately prevalent form of either peer pressure or nusiance form of petty fraud that whittles at either our wallet or our time, we are keeping track, the technology and your competitors are NOT practicing these objectionable practices in their service for our business. Take note, update, or face the consequences.
