For anybody who regularly shops for groceries, it should be common knowledge by now that food prices are beginning to rise at an alarming pace. Of course, many manufacturers are keenly aware of this, which is why they try to mask inflation by reducing package sizes instead of openly raising prices — a problem that has grown increasingly worse in 2021.
On the other hand, there are some sellers who don’t have the option of disguising their prices via smaller packaging if only because their customers get to dictate the size of the product they’re buying — your local grocery store full-service butcher department is a prime example of this.
In fact, we got a taste of just how bad inflation has struck the price of beef after we ended up paying $19.99 per pound for a couple of organic New York steaks imported from Australia. No, really. See for yourself:
It’s bad enough that those steaks added $39.68 to our grocery bill — which came to more than $300 after adding up everything else we bought that day. It’s even worse that the Honeybee didn’t realize how much we paid for the meat until after she got home and actually looked at the label the butcher slapped on the package.
You see, the problem was that, instead of steaks, the butcher gave us two pounds of ground beef at $3.49 per pound — which, by the way, is what we actually requested in the first place! Unfortunately, he inadvertently entered the price code for the more-expensive organic New York steak on his butcher-counter computer. Oops.
And people who want steak but are on a hamburger budget think they have problems?
But seriously, while that’s an innocent mistake that is easy to catch when you’re only buying a few items at the supermarket, it’s a lot harder to detect at the checkout counter when you’ve got a shopping cart full of groceries.
So keep that in mind the next time you buy meat from the butcher. Otherwise, you may unknowingly end up eating the hamburger you wanted for the price of high-quality steak.
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Photo Credits: (butcher) Thomas Leuthard; (package) The Honeybee
(This is an updated version of an article originally posted on 30 May 2017)
I didn’t even know you could buy organic New York strip from Australia!
You beat me to it. And why from Australia? Hard to believe the USA doesn’t produce its own organic New York steaks.
Scott: I didn’t know you could buy it either !
That’s quite an overcharge. I assume you got your money back right?
Oh, you better believe we did, Barbie. There’s no way I was going to let them get away with that.
It’s not just meat, Len. I shop at the bulk bins at an co-op food store (and around here, we CAN get locally produced organic steak, but I still see organic meat from Australia for sale, go figure). I bought a couple of pounds of organic beans on sale for, I don’t know, say $1.19 a pound. I wrote the bin number, something like 517 on the tag, but the clerk read it as 577 which rang me up for a bulk spice that was around $13 a pound. I had bought a lot of groceries as it was a big sale day, so I didn’t notice. As usual, I checked my receipt only after I got home, and had to return to explain the error. I took the tag with me, just in case, but at least they gave me no fuss about it. I try to check my receipts before I leave the parking lot, now.
JD, I try to pay attention at the prices I am being charged at checkout counter — but many times I get distracted because I end up conversing with the checker!
Well, I can’t say i have ever paid attention to this. Looks like I will certainly have to moving forward. Glad to hear you corrected their mistake!
When the price error is the scanner rather than the employee, it amazes me (not) that the error is almost always in favor of the store.
Isn’t it funny how that works, Harry? Kind of like when dropping a slice of bread on the ground; more often than not it is butter-side down.
I had a nice benefit the other day at the big box hardware store. They had marked down some solvent. When I got to the register, it scanned one cent instead of the reduced price. The clerk indicated when that happened, the item had been discontinued and was now free. I know, I know….nothing is free. But I smiled, thanked her and sauntered out of the store feeling like a champ. 😃
Wow! Congrats, CO2! Now why can’t that ever happen to lil’ ol’ me? 😉
They heard you have a career as a rapper, and won’t cut you a break.
I buy so many of the same items month in and month out that I can usually tell when it’s wrong. I always look at my receipt too. Still, things sometimes slip by. The store always makes it right for me.
If anything, they usually err in my favor. I’ll take the receipt back to the store but they just tell me to keep the money.
I consider it a gift from God. Goodness knows it isn’t because I’m not sassy.
Yikes! What a blunder. I think it’s great you caught that and then blogged about it with your audience. Thanks for sharing – and I know that I’ll be keeping an eye on this in the future now, too.
Cheers,
Fiona