No. No there is not.

Regarding Grocery Store Vigilantism, I have a story to tell.

Back in the my days of playing Everquest, I had a guild mate who went to a fast food place (Wendys) and paid with a Twenty and was given change as if it was a Ten. They checked the drawer and it wasn't off by $10 so the manager wouldn't do anything about it. My guildmate figured the person put the twenty in the drawer and pocketed the ten so the drawer would be even.

In any case, he ended up writing the Wendy's corporation and they either gave him a check or a gift certificate for the ten bucks. I can't remember which now, it's been awhile.

So keep in mind, corporations like good press like this as compared to bad press like yours, so worth a shot getting your money that way rather than through Grocery Store Vigilantism. Just a thought.

Agreed.

@ Alderian

You must consider the costs in all this. Lets say I had gone down the path of writing to Tesco (for it was they) high command explaining the situation. In order to do so I would have to have gone to the trouble of paying for the tools used (stamp, envelope, paper etc) and taking considerable time (we're talking tens of minutes here). Assuming an hour of my sadly finite life is worth £10, then the total costs are likely to be over a fiver. Consider also that the manager has similar costs, not to mention the expense of processing the cheque he would send, and the total cost of regaining my 74p would be at least £15.

How can we, I ask, as men of good conscience allow such tragic waste to occur in a world where so many have so little? I for one could not, and so took the noble and highly efficient route to justice that is GSV. Some may call me a hero... and who are we to say they're wrong?

...I should really avoid posting when slightly tipsy :p

@ Octavious: On the contrary, you should write while tipsy more often.
+1 for the phrase "my sadly finite life."

posting while tipsy? i can do that!

now poor octavious, consider if you will the potential cost to yourself and your reputation had you been caught in your endeavour to vigilantize this tex-co. Were you to be found out and prosecuted you could blame their previous failing but the benifit of the doubt would be long gone, and were the police to be called that would divert them from otehrwise important activities, also a member of tex-co's staff would likely be tied up making sure you stayed put until the policing forces arrived. At least half an hour by my best estimate (assuming this wasn't considered a priority and they waited until someone was free)

thus again you could have wasted tesco staff time/money while suffering a much greater risk of loss of reputation... What then i ask?

@ Orathaic

But what you are failing to consider are my talents as a master criminal. By cunningly limiting my theft to the stealing of fruit at a poorly supervised self service till it would be all too easy, if caught, to claim that I had simply miscounted the number of oranges in the bag. With my natural diplomatic flare (lets face it, we all have it) and the expertise in lying that one gets after a lifetime insisting to anyone who will listen that Everton is a team worth supporting, I was confident that the worst that could happen was being advised to count more carefully.

As much as I'd love to say something along the lines of "the higher the risk, the greater the fun", the truth is that there was a snowball's chance in hell of getting into police trouble. It amazes me that dishonest folks don't do that sort of thing all the time

Tempted to "accidently" put seven donuts in a bag and tell the clerk it was six almost every Saturday, but the UDF I go to always treats me well (and everyone else) giving us the "2 for" price on a single carton of milk or juice even though the sign says "full price if only buying one".

@ Ges: "Sales tax is the American way of telling little Johnny that he actually cannot buy that $1 candy bar with his pocket money since it really costs $1.08."

I've always wondered... why don't shops in the USA, in states where a sales tax like this is charged, put "$1.08" on the shelf label / price ticket? That's the money you have to hand over at the counter to purchase the item, so why doesn't the store labelling tend to show the actual cost of the item?

In the UK we have V.A.T. (Value Added Tax) which is effectively a kind of sales tax*, and all our shops show the price _inclusive_ of this tax.

*and a highly regressive form of taxation which has a disproportiate effect on people with lower incomes, and should be abolished.

@Jamiet

In America, at least, there is an entire field of BS which tries to find the optimal price people are willing to pay for something. For some reason, these "experts" are under the impression that people would rather buy something for $19.95 rather than $20. The store certainly doesn't want to lose out on an extra whatever cents, so they make these bullshit prices to hang in big letters and then tack on the sales tax after it's too late.

So, not only do they not include the sales tax, but everything has such a bullshit price (19.95, 0.79, 129) that you can never figure out what the fuck the final price is anyway.

Not to mention, with a sales tax of 6.25%, you'll never be able to do it in your head no matter what the price is.

Fuck.

What I really don't understand is why the spirit of competition hasn't made the American system more like the UK system. Given the choice between two shops, one of which shows the full price of an item, and one which shows the price before tax is added, I'd go to the full price one every time. Is there some legal requirement that forces US shops to not mention the tax until the till, or do American shoppers really value the mystery of not knowing how much you're spending until the last minute?

@abge - i'm pretty sure there is conclusive studies which found that 9.99 seems like a lot less than 10.00 to most people.

now perhaps some new studies are in order, but it's all about how we process numbers...

They do that in the UK as well, abgemacht. The difference is that they do it by setting the price before tax in such a way that, once you've added the tax, the total comes to £19.99 and not £20.00.

It always amuses me that they do this even for some very expensive items. So if you go shopping for a sofa, it's common to see the price as "£599.99" and not "£600.00".

As if you care about saving one single penny when you're paying six hundred pounds for something!

My wife will see something for $59.99 and tell me it is fifty bucks. I look at it and so, no honey, it's sixty bucks. I would love to abolish the penny and have merchants sell things for whole dollars where reasonable, but it ain't gonna happen.

As for including the price in the amount, I imagine if you had two stores where one advertised something for $0.99 plus 10% tax and the other advertised for $1.09 including tax, the $0.99 plus 10% tax store would sell more.

For what it is worth, I live in the state of Oregon where we don't have a sales tax so I don't deal with it much myself. And, when we go to Washington we can just show them our Oregon drivers license and we don't have to pay the Washington sales tax. So for me the price on the shelf really is the amount I pay whether in Oregon or Washington.

"As for including the price in the amount, I imagine if you had two stores where one advertised something for $0.99 plus 10% tax and the other advertised for $1.09 including tax, the $0.99 plus 10% tax store would sell more."

Seriously? Americans actually prefer being deluded? American election results are starting to make more sense...

In my retail history research, I've found that since different states and even different cities have different sales taxes, and beyond that different sales taxes on different items, corporations that had locations in more than one different state/municipality would issue all of their advertising as the base price "plus applicable tax" so that they could do one flyer print for everyone. In the UK, it's one amount across the board. In the US, it changes a lot.

For instance, Pennsylvania doesn't charge sales tax on clothes, but does on almost everything else. Non-prepared foods aren't taxed in a lot of places, but are in some. New York State has "empire zones" where sales tax is reduced or waived to promote business in that particular area. So it would be virtually impossible for a corporation that had a few branches in Pennsylvania and a few in New York to accurately assess all the prices post-tax in one flyer to hit both areas.

Sacred, thanks for the insight. A curious case of price transparency in the US concerns automobile petrol. Filling stations have to post the price, including tax, of all grades of gas sold in what must be foot-high letters on signs outside their businesses. At least, this has held true in the five or so states in which I have lived.

Yes, that's typically the case, however, recently it's changed to just posting the price of base petrol (not "silver" or whatever grade), sometimes with one price for cash and another for credit. And not only is it exact, it is the only place you will ever see fractions of a cent listed. It's always three decimal places (the final being a 9) when all our currency only goes to two.

I don't know, when I see 599.99 vs. 600.00, I'm like "Fuck, that's a lot of 9's and 9's are a large number." Not sure how other people see it.

@Sacred

Yes, that does make sense about the differing state taxes; however, that doesn't make it less frustrating.

I just round it to 600 and add 36 more for tax (only 6% where I live).

6% here in Michigan too.