Extra coupon shopping savings...

Okay since I've been couponing, I've obviously become more obssessive about my grocery spending. But one way couponing has saved me A LOT of money is by carefully looking over every item on my bill and making sure I'm paying what I expect to be paying. How so? Well for awhile I would just sort of estimate the cost of what I purchased and unless it was extremely off, I would assume that everything had rung up correctly. Since late february when I started couponing and tracking my spending I've caught the supermarket at least 3 times making a mistake on pricing. The most recent occurred today.

What happened is that the store forgot to remove the sale stickers from last week. Thus it said $2/5 when it was regular price. I was walking out of the store, looking at the bill and wondering why it was about $5 higher than I predicted it to be. So I went through each item and found two items incorrectly priced. It really bothered me. Though I was with DH, and he hasn't come grocery shopping in 3 months, I decided to go back in.

I politely explained to the store that they had incorrectly charged me the price. The customer service representative told me that was the right price. I explained that was not possible, because I saw the sign for $2/5. The service person said well it was a mistake because the computer was ringing up the item at $4.29. I explained that I felt it was misrepresentation of the item, and I wouldn't have bought it otherwise. Also I did use a coupon, but only because I thought the item was on sale. I explained that the stickered price should be honored. The representative called the manger who explained that "just this once" they would honor the price.

I left fuming. It was their mistake, at which point I was ready to ask for my money back and return the items out of principal and tell them to get my coupons out of the machine. How can they justify their laziness in improperly labelling the prices of items? It's not like I went around switching price tags, no the store just didn't correctly price the item as no longer on sale.

This is one of my hugest pet peeves and since moving out East, I've noticed it happens a lot more than in CA. I think part of the reason is that in CA there are a lot of grocery chains, i used to live by 3, plus walmart, costco, sam's, trader joe's, whole foods, etc. Out here there are only two grocery chains, so the selection they know is limited. I can't just not shop at the store because they piss me off, because I don't have anywhere else to go.

So I guess coupon shopping is helping me in other ways as well. Now I'm consciously checking every single item down to the penny. I used to do this when we were on a tighter budget but got lax over time. Now since I record my transactions I am more careful. I don't know whether to be happy or disappointed that I have to watch my stores so carefully.