IANAL and this depends on the jurisdiction, but in many places, the penalties for shenanigans like these are far steeper than for outright theft, as it's considered to be financial fraud.
Links:
> Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey has filed suit against Dollar General, claiming deceptive and unfair pricing at its more than 600 retail stores throughout the state. The lawsuit alleges that Dollar General violated Missouri’s consumer protection laws by advertising one price at the shelf and charging a higher price at the register upon checkout.
> The joint investigation revealed that “92 of the 147 locations where investigations were conducted failed inspection. Price discrepancies ranged up to as much as $6.50 per item, with an average overcharge of $2.71 for the over 5,000 items price-checked by investigators.”
https://progressivegrocer.com/dollar-general-accused-decepti...
> All told, 69 of the 300 items came up higher at the register: a 23% error rate that exceeded the state’s limit by more than tenfold. Some of the price tags were months out of date.
> The January 2023 inspection produced the store’s fourth consecutive failure, and Coffield’s agency, the state department of agriculture & consumer services, had fined Family Dollar after two previous visits. But North Carolina law caps penalties at $5,000 per inspection, offering retailers little incentive to fix the problem. “Sometimes it is cheaper to pay the fines,” said Chad Parker, who runs the agency’s weights-and-measures program.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/dec/03/customers-pa...
It goes without saying however, that the customer himself is of course not allowed to alter the price on the shelf (like the Flipper Zero program in the featured link facilitates) and then pay the altered amount :P
For the most part, when it's happened to me, they've always taken the loss on the chin and then the next time I come in the prices have been updated, but I have also once encountered a grouchy old bastard manager who, when I asked to pay the price that was listed on the shelf, immediately launched into a tirade about how people are so ungrateful and how he's not making any money, blah blah blah.
I immediately put my intended purchases on the counter and left while he berated me the entire time I was walking out of the store.
But, crazy people aside, if you're not a dick about it then most of the time they'll do right by you.
So - if the state didn't have any blabbermouths on staff, and spent some time training, how many "inspections" could they speedrun in an hour?
I've sometimes toyed with the idea of an "open sourced" grocery store that's extremely transparent about every detail. Think electronic price tags that give you a complete breakdown of the cost of an item, cost of labor, cost to account for "loss", over/under-supply, etc.
I feel like there's a niche out there for hyperinformed consumers
One of the reasons I like costco actually 10% or so is a fine margin to pay.
Trouble is, how do you prevent them making stacks of companies compounding the 10% profits. And is 10% sufficient to build up a buffer for when hard times hit?
This thinking has been triggered by fuel producers and sellers making sky rocket profits because of the increased oil prices. The same as the overheated graphics cards.
To make a poor analogy to physics: if you measure something which changes when you change unit/frame of reference -- it's not a well-defined thing.
The best policies have the same effect regardless of the legal structure (within the policy) superimposed on the actual action.
Medium policies can be optimized/gamed (perspective) -- but are designed to be adversarial, in that the gamed outcome is at least OK but potentially in fact the desired one (for example -- if you tax land, then not paying the tax means not using up land, which may be a desired policy goal). These can cause issues, though -- common law is an adversarial system, and "justice" can usually be translated to "access to lawyers," imo.
The connection with the above is that while the solution used is probably not universal -- sometimes, the optimal solution is, so the adversarial policy is just an approximation of "good policy".
Bad policies not only don't compose -- but then bureaucrats go on and insert discretion to try to make them compose. On the surface, this often looks like common sense -- but the result is insiders can keep doing the Bad Thing, but you can't do anything which isn't the Way Things Are Done -- because you need approval, and it Looks Bad.
/rant
More heavily tax profit above a certain level? Allows for funnelling back some of the excessive profits. Suffers from the same tax evasion as we currently have where profits are skewed on the books with all kinds of accounting tricks.
Demanding sales prices cannot exceed cost + 10% of cost? In aggregate or per unit?
The drug industry is like this; the profits on a single drug sale are insane, even counting the R&D costs for that particular drug. However, those profits are offset by the losses incurred on all the other drug ideas that hadn't panned out despite the hundreds of millions of dollars invested in them.
The record and publishing industries are similar. As Steve Jobs once said, the main job of a music label isn't selling records, it's not even marketing or promotion, it's identifying artists with potential to be great hits amongst the thousands of wannabes. The revenue that labels get, and it's a lot of revenue, mostly goes towards recouping the costs of failed bets.
There are coop grocery stores where members get to see the financials at a high level and make price changes that make the market sustainable. This is usually some form of shared ownership but I think this is a better way to achieve similar goals.
The reason I used the word "open sourced" is because I think a good goal to shoot for would be to allow anyone else to learn and copy the structure/data/model. It'd be more of an experiment than anything else. Like a "let's teach everyone how a grocery store actually works" thing. Maybe even a non-profit
I guess I'm thinking of something like dynamic pricing, except instead of it being used to manipulate consumers into paying the most they can possibly pay, it's used to give you really transparent, real-time information about what goes into that final pricetag
There are non-coop but organic and "fancy" grocery stores in the area as well that decimate them on prices.
Admittedly, these items are all very high quality, organic, small batch, hand crafted, local, minority-owned, protecting the rainforest etc. type products, but as a single man living alone, my grocery bill would be probably $800 a month if I bought all of my food from them.
There is something to be said for the power of group purchasing power though. For instance, you can buy a cow for much less than the cost of the individual cuts and have it butchered and split for like, $2-$4/lb of meat you receive.