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Comment by quickthrower2 | Hacker News Reader

You can do your bit by bringing all the items to the checkout, ask the price of them all, swap half of the “too expensive” ones. Then repeat. Until finally you have purchased what you want while driving them crazy.

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Unfortunately, driving the minimum wage checkout clerk crazy is probably not going to have any impact on the store owner.

In the kind of less formal bodegas that do a poor job listing prices, this clerk might very well be the owner or a family member.

Chain convenience stores and grocery stores will reliably list their prices for each item

> Chain convenience stores and grocery stores will reliably list their prices for each item

No, but the self checkout machine will, as long as the item has a UPC code.

It could have an effect on the owner in the current US job market though — clerks may no longer be willing to do crazy checkout item shuffling for minimum wage and decide to quit. Then the store owner has to choose what's in their best interest: add price tags to items so minimum-wage workers won't quit, increase wages to convince the workers to stay, or shutdown the business.

It will if people do this en-masse and the throughput of the store goes to zero.

As shitty as it is, making the job harder drives the wages up because people would rather quit than do it.

Using malevolent behavior to make someone's job harder so that turnover increases and wage growth causes market effects that induce owners to comply with laws because gov does not enforce their own laws .... God bless America where the exchange of power between consumers and corporations shall not be infringed.

Do a full Karen and ask for the manager... every time.

Never go full Karen.

Good solution probably, to vent of some steam, but otherwise there are a million things I would rather do, than fighting windmills.

How much time do you have?! Let's be realistic, typically one just wants to buy something, at the right price, and go back to doing something more fun than looking at grocery store shelves.

If I get a spam scam call suddenly my diary opens up :-)

> Mind you we checked and it is actually not legal to have no visible pricing.

Wouldn't raising awareness of the illegal activity be the easier thing to do?

It seems like the way to go is get someone to inspect the store. Each item with a pricing violation is up to $25 for the first twenty items, up to $50 for each item after capped at a total $2000[0]. Successive inspections can become even more costly.

[0]: https://law.justia.com/codes/new-york/2006/new-york-city-adm...

I checked after I got back to my home country.. I don’t live there but it definitely didn’t make me want to go back.

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