The rich own congress. At this point, it's all regulatory capture.

There's precedent for this; the Federal False Claims Act lets you sue on behalf of the government if you spot someone defrauding a federal program (in this case, perhaps if they take SNAP?). If your suit is succesful you get 15%-30% of the recovery for your troubles. There are "private attorney general" rules on the books at a state level too. I think it's kind of elegant, we can all see that inspections are understaffed, but non-compliance is often not that hard to spot and document. I'd propost that employees should have some whistleblower protection (and relief from NDAs and such) for building dossiers with supporting documentation of criminal fraud.

These provision are called "qui tam" from "qui tam pro domino rege quam pro se ipso in hac parte sequitur", or “who sues in this matter both for the king and for himself.”

I think they suit well with the US's history of bounty hunting, much like class action suits.

>Even Republicans could get behind it!

No, they have no actual interest in saving the government money, especially if it comes at the cost of enforcing regulations on corporations.

Better optimization would be to make everybody an inspector. You catch a store doing it on video and report it to the agency, you get 50% of the fine.

Amazon-style optimization? You mean they send three different inspectors to the same store on the same day, each scanning one third of the necessary items for the audit?

Offtopic, but I made the mistake once of buying groceries from Amazon and they instead sold me a package of cheddar cheese that was completely blue from mold. Some "quality" inspections they got going don't bode well for public-private "partnerships" that outsource essential government functions to a corrupt third-party that's likely to be owned by a craptastic private equity hedge fund.

Why are fines capped?

Why are we taking this whole “the $5k fine is nothing” thing at face value?

A long time ago I used to help manage a couple retail stores. A $5k random expense would have put that location into the red for the month. Perhaps not the volume of a dollar store chain, but certainly not small either.

I have a feeling that if the $5k fines were basically guaranteed to happen with some regularity you’d see this cleaned up pretty quickly with local management replaced ASAP if not.

Enforcement doesn’t have to be over the top abusive with the goal to put a location out of business overnight. Especially in already underserved communities. Like everything to do with humans there simply needs to be consistent, reliable, and timely consequences to form a reliable and immediate feedback loop for behavior.

If a store makes it an actual policy to eat these fines then the fine amount needs adjusting. From everything in this article though the problem is simply it’s worth the gamble they don’t happen at all.

I mean, more like someone elected and really high up in the state government calls the inspection office and tells them to stop, or everyone at the inspection office will get fired, since said elected person cares far more about getting reelected then the people that they should be representing.

I don't think the laws of the specific jurisdiction matter. In every US jurisdiction, the prices aren't completely legally binding (what if the previous customer changed the price tag?). In ~every US jurisdiction, if you systematically show one price but charge customers another, that's an offence.

So intent matters. What would decide an individual case is not the exact characterisation of the laws on the books, but how sympathetic a regulator or a judge is to the supermarket's claim that these things just happen sometimes.

> NC law. Does it have an "invitation to treat" practice [...] rather than a legally-binding offer?

Are there any common-law jurisdictions in the world where having products on sale in a supermarket is not generally considered invitation to treat but as an offer to sell?

It really is... God I'm glad I don't have to live there.

No, that’s just one form of regulatory capture. If this legislation is a result of lobbying from retailers opposing imposing meaningful fines, particularly if the state of things before its adoption was that penalties from failed inspections were often higher, then this is regulatory capture.