Don’t Get Over Charged For Groceries
Catch supermarket mistakes and lower your grocery bills
You clip grocery coupons to save money on your groceries. Don’t let the cashier at the grocery store sabotage all your time and effect. If you want to make sure that you get all the benefits of your work coupon clipping, make sure you pay attention to supermarket mistakes.
If you’re watching your grocery bill to keep it within budget every week, you can’t afford to let mistakes at the supermarket or grocery store that will make you pay more than you should and break your budget. If you want to save the most money from those coupons, watch the cash register and your receipt.
You should never relay on the cashier to make sure you charged the correct prices on your grocery purchases or the correct deduction of the grocery coupons. Not that they are consciously trying to cheap you. Cashiers are human and humans make mistakes. More over, most of the time, the error is with the cash registers and not the cashiers. The stores sometimes make mistakes when programming the cash registers charging higher prices than advertised or stated.
Fortunately, there are a few things you can do when your are shopping and at the check out to minimize these mistakes:
1. Keep a running total – Take along a calculator as you walk down the grocery aisles and keep a running total as you shop to keep track of what your total bill should be at the check out. If the total at the cash register is different from your running tally, you’ll know to look for errors. You might also try setting up a system that works best for you for keeping tag of the prices of the grocery items in your shopping cart.
2. Group items – Keep similar grocery items together in the cart, when you place them on the check out conveyor belt, and when you bag them to make it easier for you to follow the items being scanned and to check them against the register receipt.
3. Keep an eye on the register display – Try to watch the prices on the register display as the cashier scans each grocery item. This is easier to do if you shop with another person: you can keep an eye on the display while the other person unloads all the items from the shopping cart onto the conveyor belt.
4. Listen for the beep – Cashiers relay on the audio beep from the register to tell them the number of an item they scan. However, the scanners sometimes lag in response time and what usually happens is that the cashiers scan the same item again when they don’t hear the beep right away. Double check the number of grocery items you are charged matches the actual number you purchased.
5. Keep an eye on coupon redemption – Some grocery stores require cashiers to manually enter coupons, while other stores program their registers to do that automatically. Listen for the sound from the register that tells you a coupon is rejected and question all rejected coupons to make sure that the rejections are not mistakes by the supermarket or cashiers.
6. Bag your own groceries – To be sure that you take home everything that you paid for, bag your own groceries. Even if you don’t bag your own groceries, at least take an extra minutes to scan around the check out area for any mislay items.
7. Check your receipt before leaving the store – Check the receipt for any incorrectly rung up groceries items. It’s easier for you and the store to correct any mistakes with a full shopping cart of the items you just purchased.
If your follow the above suggestions, you can minimize mistakes made by supermarkets that can cost you money. However, by catching any mistakes made by the supermarket, you not only save money, you can turn mistakes by the supermarkets to your advantage and actually make money.
Most grocery stores and supermarkets have policies where the store will give you an item for free if the item was scanned incorrectly. In some states, laws actually require stores to give you the item for free.
Some coupon clippers and bargain hunters make a game of finding scanning errors by the stores and getting free groceries. You probably won’t get all your groceries for free by catching scanning errors, but keeping a watchful eye on supermarket and cashier mistakes is a sure fire way to keep yourself from being overcharged, and getting groceries for free is a great bonus.
