Suppose for a moment that you were walking through your local grocery story, and you came upon a product that you buy every week, with a sign saying “Save $400 on Your Favorite Product!” Let us further suppose that you know that your product normally sells for $3.29, and the shelf tag indicates that the current price is $3.09 – a modest 6% discount, but still $399.80 less than the discount promised by the sign. Recovering from your shock, you look around you and discover that the entire store seems to be brimming with such offers; prices at or slightly below the amount you are accustomed to paying, but marked as being 98% (or more) off the “List Price.” Offers so preposterous, in fact, that you can’t help wondering if some television network hasn’t resurrected “Candid Camera” or one of the other old shows that used hidden cameras and pranks to get amusing footage of shoppers. What would you do?
Well before you answer, you might want to check out a story on MSNBC this week about some of the “discount” offers that are turning up on Amazon’s grocery pages lately. One of the examples cited was a box of “Rice A Roni” – Amazon’s price was $1.48, and a local supermarket was selling it for $1.25 on sale, which seems reasonable. But the Amazon listing claimed that the “list price” on the item (e.g. the manufacturer’s suggested retail price) was $141.75. Even more amusing, in its own way, was the case of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese for a “list price” of $791.76, or $32.99 a box – rather more than the three boxes for a dollar I’m used to paying on sale. If you take a quick look around the Amazon Grocery site you can probably find a number of additional examples, unless they get to them before you do. It’s unclear from the article how this could have happened, although I think a more important question is what, if anything, should be done about it…
It’s possible that all of these unfathomable prices were introduced by a bad link, a poorly-designed database, transposition of digits, or even malfeasance (disgruntled employees, hackers showing off, etc.); it’s also possible that someone at Amazon decided to fabricate “list” prices instead of obtaining them from their vendor records, and something went haywire with their algorithms, resulting in discounts of thirty-two dollars instead of thirty-two cents over a projected list. The only reason it would matter is if someone who encountered these price comparisons was actually harmed be them – and specifically, if they were harmed in some way that could constitute fraud (resulting in criminal charges) or financial damages (which could result in civil actions). I can’t comment on the viability of the legal cases – I will, once again, caution my readers (assuming I have readers) about taking legal advice from bloggers without law degrees, but I have to wonder if such a case could get past a jury considering the absurdity of the errors involved…
In a criminal case, the prosecution would have to prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, that Amazon’s actions were intended to fool the public into believing that their prices on macaroni and cheese were more than twenty times cheaper than what you would find in a supermarket – or, alternately, that their local supermarket charges $32.99 for a box of macaroni and cheese. One could plausibly imagine a dishonest merchant inflating the competition’s prices by 10% or even 30% in order to gain more sales, but it seems unlikely that even an extremely gullible consumer would believe that a factor of 2,000% more was even possible. By the same token, it would be difficult to prove that purchasing a box of flavored rice side dish for $1.48 when you could have had it for $1.25 at the market would have caused any serious damage to anyone, even if the promised savings were in fact a deception. If Amazon was using their “list price” information to convince people to buy products at significantly inflated prices that would be fraudulent, and they would be facing both civil and criminal actions, but the prices they were offering were generally competitive – and their claims were positively surreal…
Whether or not these farcical price comparison claims represent ethical misconduct, or are indicators of a corrupt and untrustworthy corporate culture, is a separate issue, of course – but that’s a discussion for another day…
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