An Honest Mistake, But A Costly One Probably Being Made Regularly . . . At the Cost of Shoppers and to the Benefit of the Supermarkets

You might want to make sure you ask for your supermarket till receipts - and check them - as much of an embuggerance as that is for most people.

Last night, I visited New World in Masterton. I bought a piece of salmon for $9.50 and a serving of potato bake for $9.07.

The total, as displayed on the EFTPOS device? $28.07.

I know it's been a long time since I went to school, and there's all kinds of screwy stuff being promoted in today's curricula, but I'm pretty sure most of us would agree that, in reality, $9.50 + $9.07 still equals $18.57.

Only, last night it didn't. According to New World's EFTPOS machine, it equalled $28.07.

Now, I know what happened. I heard it. That unnecessarily loud beeping mechanism that beeps with the ringing up of each item, beeped twice when the salmon was passed over the check-out operator's bar code reader.

Quite apart from that, with only two items, you don't actually have to have high-level real-time arithmetic skills to process such a large anomaly.

So I had the issue fixed immediately; no problem.

Except . . . I think there IS a problem. And it probably relates to ALL supermarkets. Because how often does that happen, and how often does it happen in the context of a much larger trolley of goods where the shopper would never notice . . . unless they checked their till receipt?

I suggest it happens more frequently than the average supermarket chain would like to admit. Because I was at Countdown in Masterton a couple of weeks ago, and while I was bagging up my own groceries, a fairly hot-under-the-collar bloke came in and presented the check-out operator with his till receipt, which showed the same sort of anomaly.

So, come on, supermarket chains and local franchisees, it's up to YOU to make sure you get on top of this. It might be in your own interests not to, but it's about time you DID, out of ethical responsibility to your customers.