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Tangurena2today at 12:55 PM1 replyview on HN

Some retail chains, of which Dollar General is the poster child, have one price displayed on the shelf and a different, much higher price at the checkout register.

Links:

> Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey has filed suit against Dollar General, claiming deceptive and unfair pricing at its more than 600 retail stores throughout the state. The lawsuit alleges that Dollar General violated Missouri’s consumer protection laws by advertising one price at the shelf and charging a higher price at the register upon checkout.

> The joint investigation revealed that “92 of the 147 locations where investigations were conducted failed inspection. Price discrepancies ranged up to as much as $6.50 per item, with an average overcharge of $2.71 for the over 5,000 items price-checked by investigators.”

https://progressivegrocer.com/dollar-general-accused-decepti...

> All told, 69 of the 300 items came up higher at the register: a 23% error rate that exceeded the state’s limit by more than tenfold. Some of the price tags were months out of date.

> The January 2023 inspection produced the store’s fourth consecutive failure, and Coffield’s agency, the state department of agriculture & consumer services, had fined Family Dollar after two previous visits. But North Carolina law caps penalties at $5,000 per inspection, offering retailers little incentive to fix the problem. “Sometimes it is cheaper to pay the fines,” said Chad Parker, who runs the agency’s weights-and-measures program.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/dec/03/customers-pa...


Replies

QuantumNomad_today at 5:22 PM

In Norway, if you notice that the price at checkout is higher than what it said on the shelf, you can in most cases demand to pay the shelf price and the store has to honour it unless it is an obvious error such as some expensive electronics being tagged as costing an impossibly low amount.

It goes without saying however, that the customer himself is of course not allowed to alter the price on the shelf (like the Flipper Zero program in the featured link facilitates) and then pay the altered amount :P