Fill your shopping cart with 50 items and you can expect two will scan into the cash register at the wrong price. That's according to data collected by inspectors for the Washington Department of Agriculture and analyzed by the Herald. Over the last three years, state inspectors have checked the prices of 23,000 goods. Of those, nearly 5 percent were priced wrong. The good news is errors are slightly more likely to be in your favor.
Some stores do better than others.
About a quarter of the stores statewide had no errors when inspectors checked the prices of 50 to 100 items. It's in the stores' best interest to manage their pricing systems well, state officials said. We find, across the board, merchants are anxious to get things right. He expects his inspectors to use the surprise price checks for more than monitoring price accuracy. He sees them as a chance to educate merchants.