Brought to you by my discovery that some people think that “the customer is always right” isn’t the slogan of a long-dead department store, but rather it’s an actual call the cops law.
Brought to you by my discovery that some people think that “the customer is always right” isn’t the slogan of a long-dead department store, but rather it’s an actual call the cops law.
Not really the case in most of the EU.
It doesn’t count obviously if it’s a misplaced item and the price is clearly labelled for another item. However, if a store leaves discount stickers on some product late, or mislabels some price, they are obligated to sell at that price. There is caveat that it only works if the price is believable, but I managed to get a ton of shrimp that just arrived at a Lidl 90% off one time. Family was eating shrimp for weeks.
My dad and I were shopping at Home Depot one December and found a small Christmas decoration I wanted. When we got it to the register the cashier couldn’t find a tag or sticker on it. Normally I’d go get another one with a tag but this was the only one they had. The cashier tried looking it up through the computer system but still couldn’t figure it out. She handed it to us and told us it was free because it was the store’s fault that she couldn’t find the price.
We’ve been enjoying that decoration for years, my mom still puts it in the middle of her kitchen display. And we always remember how nice that cashier was to us.
Where in the EU would that be the case?
AFAIK a legally binding contract only happens once you actually exchange money for a product. That should be true pretty much all over the world as long as there’s actual laws/customs regulating this process.
Any prices/offers or whatever else you might see in or around a store are in no way legally binding no matter how believable the prices are.
Otherwise anyone can just run around with a 10/20/50% off sticker and force any store to sell them whatever they want for much cheaper.
Or they can just steal it, it’s just as legal. In my experience this is law in a lot of the EU, including Germany and a bunch of Eastern European places.
In my case, it wasn’t a misplaced 90% off sticker, it was just that the normal price tag on the shelf was printed with one zero less. It was also a “premium” item at the time, so the price wasn’t that much off, just cheap. It wasn’t just a bunch of shrimp, it was ready made, cleaned, arranged into a neat circle with dipping sauces in the middle.
On the other hand, I had a thing where Microsoft was introducing Skype to a country where the local currency was around 200:1 to the dollar. They messed up the currency conversion, and it defaulted back to 1:1, giving everyone a 99.5% discount on consumer electronics. It was obviously not honoured, and the law was clear, so no lawsuits either.
At least in Germany that’s the case.
Every contract is legally binding in Germany, even verbal contracts or in this case price tags (to some degree). Obviously other laws may invalidate them and verbally is hard to prove. For example if you advertise onetime off prices for a week to lure people in the store you have to have a reasonable amount of these items to be available through the week, otherwise people are eligible to get the offer or compensation.
Adding your own sticker would probably be fraud and easy to prove for the store (not matching sticker, no plans to reduce prices, …).