Brought to you by my discovery that some people think that “the customer is always right” isn’t the slogan of a long-dead department store, but rather it’s an actual call the cops law.
Brought to you by my discovery that some people think that “the customer is always right” isn’t the slogan of a long-dead department store, but rather it’s an actual call the cops law.
Where in the EU would that be the case?
AFAIK a legally binding contract only happens once you actually exchange money for a product. That should be true pretty much all over the world as long as there’s actual laws/customs regulating this process.
Any prices/offers or whatever else you might see in or around a store are in no way legally binding no matter how believable the prices are.
Otherwise anyone can just run around with a 10/20/50% off sticker and force any store to sell them whatever they want for much cheaper.
At least in Germany that’s the case.
Every contract is legally binding in Germany, even verbal contracts or in this case price tags (to some degree). Obviously other laws may invalidate them and verbally is hard to prove. For example if you advertise onetime off prices for a week to lure people in the store you have to have a reasonable amount of these items to be available through the week, otherwise people are eligible to get the offer or compensation.
Adding your own sticker would probably be fraud and easy to prove for the store (not matching sticker, no plans to reduce prices, …).
This seems to be contrary to what I can find. A price tag is not a contract but an “invitatio ad offerendum” so an invitation for the customer to make an offer at the checkout. Then a contract is created when the cashier accepts this price after scanning it and matching it with the price in their system. Therefore it’s not the price tag that counts but the price in the cash register. I could be wrong or the law has changed in the last 1-2 years, but I found this information here (sorry they are all in german):
https://www.mdr.de/ratgeber/recht/preisbindung-supermarkt-regal-kasse-100.html
https://www.test.de/Verbraucherrecht-Regal-oder-Kasse-welcher-Preis-gilt-5115345-0/
https://www.verbraucherzentrale-niedersachsen.de/themen/kaufen-reklamieren/regal-kasse-welcher-preis-gilt
Yeah you’re right, looks like I’ve mixed up something.
Or they can just steal it, it’s just as legal. In my experience this is law in a lot of the EU, including Germany and a bunch of Eastern European places.
In my case, it wasn’t a misplaced 90% off sticker, it was just that the normal price tag on the shelf was printed with one zero less. It was also a “premium” item at the time, so the price wasn’t that much off, just cheap. It wasn’t just a bunch of shrimp, it was ready made, cleaned, arranged into a neat circle with dipping sauces in the middle.
On the other hand, I had a thing where Microsoft was introducing Skype to a country where the local currency was around 200:1 to the dollar. They messed up the currency conversion, and it defaulted back to 1:1, giving everyone a 99.5% discount on consumer electronics. It was obviously not honoured, and the law was clear, so no lawsuits either.
In most of US, the price tag is a legally binding offer, and its presence is required by law in most cases. Here for example is NYC law:
New York City Administrative Code
Title 20: Consumer and Worker Protection
Chapter 5: Unfair Trade Practices
Subchapter 2: Truth-in-Pricing Law
§20-708 Display of total selling price by tag or sign.
§ 20-708.1 Item pricing.
City inspectors may perform random checks to compare tag price to scanner price at checkout and fine store $25-$100 for every incorrect/missing tag, and may repeat the inspections every 24 hours until problem is solved.
If you run around slapping your own discount stickers it wouldn’t count since the store didn’t do it, you are just committing fraud. The store would be on the hook if it continued to display the fraudulently-mislabeled product for sale after being made aware of it.