But it's the mistakes that shoppers remember. But the most common error is when the price entered into the computer is wrong. Jung's agency has conducted two studies looking at the accuracy of electronic scanners in grocery stores, as well as drug, department and hardware stores. Sometimes there isn't quite enough attention paid. Sometimes there's a little bit of negligence involved.
Pricing is a very, very meticulous thing.
When you have a store that has upwards of 40,000 or 50,000 items I think it is inevitable that you are going to have some errors. One FTC study found that with regular priced products, errors occurred in 1 out of every 32 items. But there were more errors on sale items - 1 out of every 28. You've got signage involved, and you usually have an ad involved. So to have an accurate price on an item you have to have the sign match the ad, match the price the computer.