Wal-Mart Thieving Milk Scam

My one reader may remember last week, or the week before when I said I would not set foot inside that corrupt bastion of bad behavior that calls itself Krogers, due to chronic, over and over again price mistakes that I really think should have some Kroger employee sometime somewhere charged with theft just like Kroger's would with a shoplifter.

I've mentioned before that while Wal-Mart sometimes makes mistakes, with Wal-Mart it can go either way, their favor or mine, unlike Krogers where it is always in their favor. Which is what makes Krogers' pricing mistakes seem like purposeful thievery.

Now back to Wal-Mart. For months now Wal-Mart has been selling milk at $1.98 a gallon. Last week on the way back from Southlake I knew I neeed a gallon, so I stopped at the North Richland Hills Wal-Mart Supercenter, took the 2 mile walk to the back where the milk is, saw the BIG "GALLON MILK $1.98" sign.

Walked the 2 miles back to the self-checkouts. Quickly scanned the milk and it rang up as $2.00. I think to myself, how stupid, but 2 cents was not worth fussing about. That and I was in a hurry.

Now, today I was in Chinatown in Arlington. On the way back from that I went to the Tandoor Indian Restaurant (again) for their lunch buffet. After on the way back here I remembered I needed milk again.

So, I stop at my neighborhood Eastchase Wal-Mart Supercent, run in, well, more accurately I walked quickly in, made the 2 mile journey to the back of the store, saw the $1.98 sign I'm used to see. Grabbed my milk and quickly made the 2 mile trek back to the front of the store.

Scanned the milk and you can see the result in the picture of the receipt above. Again, $2.00

So, almost a week after the first incident, at a different store, and now again today, Wal-Mart got 2 cents more than I thought I was going to be paying them. Now, if Wal-Mart is running this Milk Scam system wide that could add up to a lot of pennies.

I suspect Wal-Mart employs psychologists, just like Microsoft does, to try and figure out how much pain they can inflict before their customers react. The research probably showed something like only 1 in 3,459 customers was even going to notice the mistake and that only 1 in 55,493 of those who do notice would take the time to wait in the Customer Service line to complain. The research probably also showed that something like 1 in 433,356 of those who notice the mistake will blog about it and at that time they'd have to label the blogger a crackpot.