“In one court case in Ohio, Dollar General’s lawyers argued that “it is virtually impossible for a retailer to match shelf pricing and scanned pricing 100% of the time for all items. Perfection in this regard is neither plausible nor expected under the law.””

Sorry—-what? Isn’t that one of the fundamental basic jobs to be done and expectations of a retailer? You put physical things on display for sale, you mark prices on them, and you sell them. When the prices change, you send one of your employees to the appropriate shelves and you change the tag.

When on earth did we get into a world where that absolutely fundamental most basic task is now too burdensome to do with accuracy?

I used to work at Best Buy replacing pricing stickers before the store opened. We had a sheet of new stickers for changed prices every time and had to scan every sticker in the store to make sure they were all up to date.

It makes sense they’re all switching to e-ink tags though, probably saves a ton in labor and the occasional mistake.

An easy test for this is how often the price at the register is higher vs lower than the marked price. If it's close to 50%, then ok, it's a mistake. But if it's higher...

It’s virtually impossible for them because they’re not considering hiring more people to do it.

Dollar General stores often run with one overworked staff member doing everything in the store, from stocking to working the register (which is why the register is unstaffed so much and you have roam the store to find someone to ring you up…)

Just make the sticker price legally binding and this issue would be solved with almost perfect precision.

Dollar General: "people these days just don't want to work (meaning, my clients don't want to do that work or pay lazy genZers...)!"

> When on earth did we get into a world where that absolutely fundamental most basic task is now too burdensome to do with accuracy?

It always has been this way since barcoded stock keeping units because of the problems identified by CAP Theorem [0]. Since the price data of an object must exist in two locations, shelf and checkout, the data is partitioned. It is also relatively expensive to update the shelf price since it depends on physical changes made by an unreliable human. Even if all stores used electronic price tags there will a very small lag, or a period in which prices are unavailable (or a period of unavailability like an overnight closure).

It would be interesting to understand at what point of shelf/checkout accuracy would lead to what increases in overall prices [1]. That is to say that pricing information has a cost: a buyer must bring the item to checkout to find out the true cost in the case of authoritative checkout, or the clerk must walk to each shelf in the case of authoritative shelf.

Once upon a time, each item in the store was labeled with a price tag and the clerk typed that tag into a tabulation device in order to calculate tax and total. The advent of the bar code lead to shelf label pricing since the clerk needn't read a price from each item, leading to the CAP Theory problem of today.

I suppose that the future will bring back something similar to individual price tags in the form of individual RFID pricing. This way each individual item on a shelf can be priced in a way that is readable by the buyer and the seller in the same manner.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAP_theorem

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_efficiency