“Don’t look, mathematicians or grammarians, but…”
Babylonians
I can’t not look! I can’t unlook!
Frequently sold as Unleaded 88, E15 is a blend of 15% ethanol and 85% gasoline. It contains 5% more ethanol than E10
Not sure of this counts as Innumeracy, but maybe.
We do all our grocery shopping online these days (order online, drive to get it, they bring it out to the car). Unless you specifically say no substitutes, if necessary, they will substitute, giving you the original price or the price of the substitute, whichever is lower.
Like today. If I had ordered 3 individual strawberry yogurt cups and they didn’t have them, they might have given me a 4-pack for the price of the three individuals. OK, fine business practice, not innumeracy.
In fact, I had ordered 6 individual cups (on sale, so cheaper than 2 individuals plus a 4-pack.). They only had 3 individual cups. So they gave me those, plus a 4-pack for the other 3, at the price of 6 individuals.
Not total innumeracy, but far more sensible to give me 2 individuals plus a 4-pack, instead of 3 plus a 4-pack.
That’s nice that they do that. Here they charge the higher of the original or substitution. And they will charge the $4.95 fee if your order goes below $35 due to something being out of stock. And you don’t get to approve substitutions. Like they substituted my cheese pizza with a cheze (aka fake cheese) pizza … even when I had said “no substitutions”. And since the cheze pizza costs more than the cheese pizza I had to pay extra for the grossest pizza on the planet.
In short, online ordering from the local grocery store colossally sucks, and has been getting worse and worse throughout the pandemic. So I rarely do it any more.
Online ordering from Target, on the other hand, rocks.
Here it has been very good and getting better. It first there was a minimum order ($30 I think) and a $2.95 fee with $30, but now I know they’ve eliminated the fee and I think eliminated the minimum. They’ve certainly made some billing mistakes and substitution mistakes, but they’ve been very responsive fixing errors, often giving more than we asked for (I guess that’s sort of like an “if it scans wrong, you get it free”, Also, there were many cases of if you didn’t like the substitution, you could keep it free.) They have toughened up on substitutions from that stance: now they send you an e-mail, listing substitutions, when they notify you your order is ready for pickup. You don’t have to accept the substitution, but if you do, you pay the price shown in that e-mail.
We’ve even gotten occasional refunds on produce when we complained about quantity (broccoli by the crown, absurdly small crowns) or quality (way past how it should be when sold), but those complaints have been very rare and what we’ve gotten is generally pretty good. We get some broccoli almost every week.
I bet the billing errors in our favor (which I don’t report) have been bigger than the errors against us (which I do), and the errors against us have always been fixed. Only takes a phone call to get the corrections.
Of course, they don’t expect you to check your order at the store pickup. It’s almost always right, but if something was missing they readily credit you that amount.
Wow!!! At my grocery store it’s more like “if it scans wrong we will treat you like pond scum and make you wait an eternity for a manager who will loudly blame you for our software failing and yell at you in front of everyone and if you are willing to yell back long enough and loud enough then after 45 - 60 minutes we will begrudgingly throw the money in your general direction.”
That may be a slight exaggeration, but only a slight one. There are pages upon pages of Nextdoor posts complaining about how awful they are, but they are a near-monopoly so it’s hard to avoid shopping there.
I VERY rarely go inside the grocery store any more. They originally had that policy, probably for several years after introduction of self-scanners. They don’t any more, but they are pretty nice about fixing problems.
I’m in the grocery store probably 4-5 times a week and some sort of food store 8-10 times a week.
I’ve never once ordered groceries online. Three times ever, I’ve ordered an item from Target to go pick it up and once from Lowes. I have ordered perhaps a dozen things online for delivery in the past 10 years. Often, I will look online to see if an item is in stock and then I will go pick it up. If they don’t have it I either choose something else or I’m out of luck.
My wife does a fair bit of shopping online, but it’s mostly clothes.
I much prefer going into a store. There may be something else I want/need that I wasn’t thinking of that I see on the shelf.
That’s precisely why I prefer not going into the store.
If you’re going to Kroger, next time it happens, ask the manager about their Scan Right Guarantee. The first overcharged item should be free, and the rest charged at the correct price.
Last time it was like a 30 minute wait for the manager, and that’s after a 20 minute wait to get to the front of the customer service line, and that’s after a 15 minute wait in the regular line. It’s easier to just not shop there in the first place.
Pro-tip. Order your items in price order, highest to lowest in case scanner malfunctions, you’ll be getting the most expensive item left for free!
Our online ordering from the grocery store is a disaster, the staff really don’t seem to care to get it right at all. But the Target version seems to work quite well, so we usually just get food from there.
I’ve seen very few incorrect scans (which may mean that I just haven’t noticed them), but every time it was because the price stored in the system for the item was wrong, not that there was something wrong with the scanner. Usually, but not always, they correct the stored prices right away.
I understand. But if there are two (or more) items in your basket that the computer has wrong, you are guaranteed to get the highest price one for free with my method.