Countdown says it appreciates the frustration of customers after a man was overcharged by a store in Canterbury.
A Canterbury shopper posted on Reddit earlier this week, saying he had grabbed an avocado at a Countdown store priced at $2.99, but when scanning it, it came up as $6.
He also took a cabbage priced at $2.50, only to find it scanned for $5.
"Staff are apologetic and quick to refund when the errors are pointed out," he wrote.
"My concern is that I'm a numbers nerd and find it easy to remember the advertised price and catch scanning errors ... but what about all those "normal" people who aren't as pedantic as me?
"I have yet to catch a scanning error in my favour ... Countdown needs to lift its game."
Some people on the post speculated that Countdown's new point of sale software was to blame, as it was less responsive to price changes made by department managers in-store.
Countdown said in a statement that the 1POS software, which it has been implementing across New Zealand since 2016, was not to blame.
"We haven’t seen any increase in incorrect pricing as a result of moving to more modern software," the spokesperson said.
"Most Countdown supermarkets stock more than 20,000 items, each of which has its own unique price that can change often.
"Our price teams do their best every day to ensure each price is loaded in our system and ticketed accurately, but there are of course occasions when mistakes are made in our systems or when human error occurs.
"When this happens, our policy is to refund the price and provide the item free of charge.
"We appreciate that it’s frustrating for customers when things go wrong."
The Commerce Commission last year issued an open letter to retailers warning them that the price on an item had to match the price a customer is charged in order for the retailer to meet their obligations under the Fair Trading Act.
Fines for failing to meet those obligations can result in large, six-figure fines.
Consumer NZ spokesperson Maggie Edwards said at the time they have always advised supermarket customers to check their dockets.
"Some people are offered their dockets and say no – in which case over-charging is hard to prove," Ms Edwards said.
"Every computer system can have a failure so it’s a good Plan B."
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