Standing in line at the Home Depot, trying to buy 10 bags of dirt, Mark Zaitz got rung up for $20.
A retired elementary school principal, he did the math and could not figure out how 10 bags of topsoil, at $1.48 a bag, came to $20.
“The taxes can’t be that high,” he said.
He looked at his receipt and discovered the scanner had charged him $1.98 a bag, even though the sign above the dirt had said $1.48. He asked the cashier to fix it. The cashier called over an associate.
“They just had a blank look on their face, like, ‘What do you want us to do?”‘ Zaitz said.
Shoppers do not always check the prices they are charged at a checkout line, but they should. Sometimes those prices do not match what’s posted on shelves.
“It’s like anything that depends on technology and people,” said George Whalin of Retail Management Consultants in San Marcos, Calif. “Things go wrong.”
It’s too cumbersome to recall the prices of every item in a grocery cart and then check that they match what the almighty scanner decides to charge. That’s why many states sanction retailers if their scanners overcharge more than 2 percent or 3 percent of the time.
In Colorado, the standard is an error rate of 2 percent or lower, and it’s enforced by the state’s Department of Agriculture. Last year, its inspectors found overcharge errors in 2.4 percent of the items it tested. This resulted in 199 civil penalties.
“Promising one price and charging a higher price is against the law,” said Kristin Macey, chief of the Ag Department’s Measurement Standards Section.
Most retailers know the importance of satisfied customers and scanner accuracy, but inexperienced clerks in labyrinthine stores will lead to errors.
“There are literally thousands of items in that store, coming in every single day,” Whalen said of Home Depot. “It’s virtually impossible to keep up with them all of the time.”
At some stores, including grocers King Soopers and Safeway, there are consequences if a customer spots an error.
“If it scans incorrectly, we will give it to you free,” said King Soopers vice president Dave Savage. “That’s our policy.”
Home Depot does not have such a policy, said spokewoman Kathryn Gallagher.
“We work diligently to make sure our prices are correct,” she said. “If there is a discrepancy, we’ll do what it takes to make it right.”
Zaitz, 57, who lives in Arapahoe County and shops Home Depot near Arapahoe Road and I-25, said he was surprised by how long it took to fix the problem.
He had to find a store manager, tell his story again, show the store manager the sign above the dirt, walk back to the front of the store, get a refund for the bags he bought at $1.98, and repurchase them at $1.48. This was time he meant to spend gardening.
Zaitz, who managed grocery stores in his younger days, said he was surprised he wasn’t offered something for his troubles. It was a $5 error, but he’s been stewing about it for days.
“If a company wanted to hold itself accountable to its own human errors, they would have a sign that says, ‘It’s free if we overcharge you,”‘ Zaitz said. “That would be integrity.”
Home Depot probably made an honest mistake, I said. Zaitz wasn’t so sure.
He’d read how the company paid its former CEO Bob Nardelli a scandalous $210 million severance package. He’d also read about its profits plunging 29 percent in the first quarter of this year, as well as expectations for flattening sales ahead.
“They’re so needy that they are putting pressure on their store management,” he said. “Every bag of soil times 50 cents starts to add up.”
I don’t think this would be a viable plan, since it might take enough dirt to fill the Grand Canyon to pay off Nardelli.
“They’re playing the odds,” Zaitz continued. “‘If you find it, we will correct it.’ But the odds say a large number of people aren’t going to notice.”
Zaitz said he asked for a Home Depot manager to give him a call. “Do you think anybody has called me?”
“I’m sorry to hear about his experience,” Gallagher, the Home Depot spokeswoman, said. “It sounds like he had an unpleasant experience.”
Al Lewis’ column appears Sundays, Tuesdays and Fridays. Respond to Lewis at denverpostbloghouse.com/lewis, 303-954-1967 or alewis@denverpost.com.
