The thin red line

When the scanner crosses your purchase, it might not charge what you think.

[Times photo: Cherie Diez] Tammy Sliby and daughters Amanda, 11, and Lindsey, 6, stand at Wal-Mart's checkout line as their items are scanned Saturday in St. Petersburg.

By ANITA KUMAR

© St. Petersburg Times, published July 30, 2000

Tom Renaud popped into the Wal-Mart supercenter down the street from his house to pick up a can of bug spray. But when he got to the checkout counter, the scanner showed the can was almost $3 more than the shelf price.

He complained, and Wal-Mart sold the spray at the lower price -- as is the store's policy.

But Renaud, who shops at that Wal-Mart four or five times a week, went back the next day to check if the store had fixed the problem. They hadn't.

It wasn't the first time the store had made a scanning mistake, Renaud said. But this time, he said, he was so fed up he reported the Bradenton store to the state.

"I always watch the prices," he said, "so this really irritated me."

Not all shoppers are as price conscious as Renaud.

But with the arrival of Florida's tax-free week and back-to-school shopping frenzy, consumer protection experts are encouraging customers to watch for mistakes that happen more than people think.

The most recent nationwide survey shows that scanners have become more accurate since the 1970s but still produce mistakes one in every 33 items. That's a major improvement from 1996, when one mistake was detected in every 21 items.

"I think some pricing errors are inevitable," said Louise Jung, an attorney with the Federal Trade Commission, which conducted the two studies on price scanning. "But I think accuracy can be improved in many cases. It can always be better."

Mistakes are split between overcharges and undercharges, with more than half of them in the customers' favor. The study shows grocery stores are the most accurate and hardware and home improvement stores the least.

Government officials have found no evidence that overcharges are intentional, said May Gray, chief of the state's Bureau of Weights and Measures. Instead, most mistakes are blamed on human error -- scanners that have not been updated, signs that were not changed or removed or a computer mistake that caused inaccurate prices throughout a chain of stores.

"We try. We probably can never be 100 percent in every store everyday," said Jan Drummond, a spokeswoman for Sears. "We think we're doing okay, but when someone catches us, it's pretty embarrassing."

The scanners, first used on a pack of Wrigley's Juicy Fruit gum in a Troy, Ohio, supermarket in 1974, flash a laser on a bar code attached to the item being purchased. These codes bear a series of lines and spaces of varying widths that identify each product and tell a computer what price to ring up.

Retailers say scanners have quickened checkout time, lowered labor costs, improved inventory records and produced fewer pricing errors than manual entry, said Linda Joy, spokeswoman for the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

As recently as a decade ago, the machines failed to read about 30 percent of bar codes on the first try, mostly because of poorly printed code labels. Better labels and improved scanners have cut the error rate to almost zero.

But that doesn't matter to many shoppers. They continue to watch the prices as their items are scanned.

Betty Ridge watched the cashier carefully at the Wal-Mart in St. Petersburg on Friday as each item was put into a plastic bag. When the cashier was done, Ms. Ridge glanced at the receipt.

"I always watch," she said after making sure she was charged the right amount. "Occasionally, I have to tell them something is wrong."

In Florida, 15 state inspectors randomly visit a fraction of the thousands of stores across the state that use scanners, including those that sell groceries, clothes and liquor. A store with more than two mistakes in every 50 items will receive a warning and could be fined if the problem persists, Gray said.

Twenty of the 35 stores the state checked in the Tampa Bay area since December 1999 made mistakes, state records show. The mistakes varied from a cent overcharge to a $20 undercharge.

With only 15 inspectors in charge of monitoring scanners in addition to gas pumps, taxi meters and other commercial scales, most stores are never going to be checked by the government.

That's why consumer protection experts say shoppers can help themselves much more than any government agency.

Be observant, compare prices and complain if something is wrong, they encourage. Most stores are receptive when a customer points out a mistake, and some even give an item free if the wrong price is rung up.

Paula Ryan said she always checks prices. That's how she found out the Family Dollar Store in Lakeland was ringing up $2.99 items as $3; $4.99 items as $5; and $7.99 items as $8.

"When I asked about it, they told me it was just a couple of pennies," Ms. Ryan said. "But if it's a penny for everyone, everyday, 365 days a year, how much money are we talking?"

-- Times researcher Kitty Bennett and Caryn Baird contributed to this report.

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