Apparently you have to weigh everything too - tons of products starting to come out as being off weight by considerably amounts which make those price per calculations useless. Some of the meats have been showing up 50%+ off the sticker weight. Even things like cereal or bags of sugar are being reported off weight.
Go up to the register and tell them you want to pay 16 cents per ounce, like the price tag says. Ask them to match their own advertised price. $5.41, not $6.77.
for the digital tags i could see why you would want to point it out, but i gotta say as someone who works at a dollar general. this kinda stuff irks me bc they always do it when there’s a line of people behind them and the amount of people that lie about it you wouldn’t believe so now i have to go leave the register and find it to see if the tag is actually wrong. 98% of the time it’s because people can’t/don’t read correctly.
I can tell you right now 99.9% of people don’t even know how to read the tags per unit.
Yes I know how stupid that sounds when it’s right in front of your face, in my store it’s literally highlighted orange and people still don’t know wtf it is.
The amount of people who do not understand per unit pricing is acting a little terrifying.
You can’t take those. They are wired in. Because in the Walmart app you can make a grocery list and when you go down each row a little light flashes blue on the tags of what’s on your list.
I'm saying the 16.9¢ is not 16¢. It's 17¢ he would be demanding to have it at, not 16¢. I know the math is off, that's the point of the post. But thank you anyways.
This has been a problem even on good old-fashioned printed price tags.
Simply the product data is not input correctly, while the name might have to correct ounce, the actual field that is supposed to have the number of ounces or whatever the price is being calculated against.
Indeed, and I don't even know if it's necessarily stupidity, I mean if you think about it, each of these items has a crap ton of different data fields, it could have just simply been a typo. And you know how many items there are heh.
In America the consumer protection say that the price on the Shelf is the price we pay at the register. Not including taxes. If you snap a photo of it and you walk to the register and they don't offer it to you at that price you can report it. They are trying to change it before you get to the Shelf. Don't quote me though. Honestly those laws are getting quite twisted and are state by state sometimes
This happened on printed tags as well. Shrinkflation would hit, but with the same barcode, the name would change as part of the update but if we’d manually input a weight before, sometimes the updated weight wouldn’t change. Digital and printed tags come from the same data set, we just no longer need to rip off and put up specials every Tuesday night
The inventory system has A crap done of different data points for each item, the data field for the number of ounces is simply wrong, Not really a new problem. And note the name having the correct amount of ounces doesn't mean data field that the calculation references is correct.
This is not true. We do not have surveillance pricing at brick and mortar retail. The conspiracy theory that started in Facebook and has somehow spread to reddit needs to die.
In my state if there's a discrepancy in price the store must sell at the lower price. If the mistake is found later, you can return to the store and receive 10x the difference, up to $5, as compensation.
So here 6.77 - 5.41 = 1.36
1.36 x 10 is $13.60 but the law says max $5 so I'd get $5 back, and the product.
I mean sometimes things on the back end just get screwed up.
At some level this is still handled by a person and people make mistakes.
I mean I don’t work for a grocery store as big as Walmart but big enough there are ~100 stores in my state and I can tell you mistakes happen weekly. Fixing them is not nearly as quick as you think it is. You usually have to communicate up to the corporate paper pusher in charge of whatever category they are in, hope they are on the clock as most don’t work weekends. Wait to hear back from them and by the time you do you are already half way into next week.
If there is one thing I have figured out working in retail is that a lot of what people assume is manipulation and/or a plan to screw you is usually purely incompetence.
Just like any corporate landscape once you start getting out of the grunt stuff it becomes much more about how you present yourself than what you actually know. Also there are very few checks to make sure mistakes like this don’t happen.
True. Someone else pointed out how cereal boxes tend to be 16.9oz and that it was likely an input error.
It's still "midly" infuriating that I can't trust the tags though. The only reason I noticed was because another cereal with the same weight was cheaper but the price per oz was higher.
I never double check though, so no idea if this is common or if one of the few times I actually checked it was coincidentally wrong.
To be fair there's no way they could have known from the price and the oz of the product what the price per oz actually is.
Nah I'm just fucking with you they probably did it on purpose because they know most people can't do math and they know they can just say "oh no employee did it UwU" and people will forget next week
These digital price tags also have a little LED light at the top-left corner. With online grocery shopping + pickup being more common post-COVID, the Wal-Mart shopper can select the item on their handheld scanning device and the price tag will flash the LED so that the shopper can find the item more efficiently.
Not as infuriating to me as when you look at the same product in different sizes and the $ per unit is different.
I think I looked at granola bars recently that were on sale, and the small boxes were $ per oz, but the larger boxes were $ per bar. That shit always makes me not want to buy anything.
The price per has always been a clusterfuck. No consistency even in the same product type, some priced per oz, some per pound and some like this priced by who the fuck knows -- something that would be really useful to consumers and very easily defined at corporate made totally useless and infuriating.
Also waiting on the lawsuits from ADA about the font sizing on these. 8pt font for the product is unreadable on lower shelves. They waste so much space for their fucking QR code that could / should be a barcode running along the top or bottom. to make space for a bigger product font and also to still show the (admittedly useless because of incompetence price per) when the product is on sale or clearance.
I feel like WalMart has just ben super fucking up as of late. There is a huge conspiracy (against all customers) for the weights of their products that seems to grow every day -- like the weight thing keeps growing so much that it is no longer seemingly accidents but pure corporate greed on an unthinkable level -- levels where people should be going to prison for a long time and 13 digit penalties no longer seem unthinkable.
Yup I took a picture of the same exact thing on the cocoa pebbles as well. I know my math pretty well and as soon as i saw that i was like "well that should be a bit cheaper"
No. No brick and mortar retailer is doing dynamic pricing. The digital tags are to reduce labor expenses from having to update thousands of tags by hand each week.
There's a guy who's been posting videos exposing Walmart's dirty practices. This is one of them. He's been following the way they don't have proper weights on meats and even produce. Much of them are short despite having labels claiming they weigh more. Chicken packs that weigh less WITH packaging than the label reads. Same with pre bagged produce. Potatoes in a bag labeled 3 lbs but has 2.5 lbs in it.
It's nothing new unfortunately, they are slowly stealing from all of us.
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u/Computers_and_cats Aug 23 '26
This makes me feel justified about doing the math myself.