Business Practices & Corporate Accountability In The News

If some retailers get their way on Beacon Hill, consumers may soon be hit with a double whammy when grocery shopping. Not only is the price of goods soaring, but stores seemingly want to make it harder for shoppers to find out the price of groceries before buying them.

An extraordinarily anti-consumer bill has just been approved by a legislative committee that would allow supermarkets to stop putting prices on items as is currently required, if they install do-it-yourself price scanners in some store aisles.

While a price sticker is about as low-tech as you can get, no one has yet invented a better technology to disclose prices. The electronic scanners that retailers are proposing to install in only one of every two or three aisles creates a new inconvenience for harried shoppers.

Worse, these machines have repeatedly been proven unreliable. A year after the attorney general authorized their use in non-food stores, a test of nearly 400 scanners in 32 different stores revealed that three out of four failed to function properly or meet state requirements. Now, this is what they want to install in our supermarkets too?

Even worse, the bill lists 17 broad categories of items, including advertised sale items and thousands of others, where the price will not be required to be disclosed either on the item or at the aisle scanner. You will just have to buy the item to find out the price, or squint at the price sign or label on the shelf that no longer has to have prices at least one inch high.

The proposed law not only eases the pricing burden for retailers, but curtails enforcement at the expense of shoppers. The law that mandates periodic inspections of checkout scanners for accuracy is being repealed.

Fines for violations also are being slashed by 90 percent to a mere $250 once a year in most cases for stores with aisle scanners. Worse, inspectors will be forced to go through a time-consuming court process to even get that penalty assessed. To top it off, depending on the type of store, there are no longer fines for overcharging, incorrect prices on items still price marked, or erroneous checkout scanners.

We all know that compliance with our laws are only as good as our ability to enforce them. Without the threat of easy enforcement and significant fines, compliance rates will lik