Mass. and pricing
DOWNTOWN
Change happens
By Steve Bailey, Globe Staff, 12/6/2000
In this dot-com world of ours, why are we still requiring a
clerk with a price gun in his hand to attach a price sticker to every can of SpaghettiOs? OK, so this is hardly a matter of state, I understand. But it does offer some interesting counterintuitive insights into our stereotypes about power - who has it, who doesn't, and why.
The issue is ''item pricing'' in supermarkets and other retail stores, something The Boston Globe's consumer reporter, Bruce Mohl, has written about often. Every couple of years the big retailers make a run at Massachusetts' antiquated item-pricing regulations and every couple of years they fail even if almost every other state sees it differently.
On one side is ''big business'' - the Stop & Shops, the Shaw's, the Wal-Marts, the Home Depots. And on the other side are the ''consumer advocates'' - the MassPIRGs, the get-a-life geeks like Colman Herman - and the retail unions worrying about job losses. And it's no contest: The consumer advocates and the unions win hands down.
If you were South Boston state Senator Stephen Lynch, who has blocked the supermarkets' bills in the Legislature, or Attorney General Thomas F. Reilly, who is now reviewing the other retailers proposals, what would you do? What's the upside in being tagged anticonsumer or antilabor? Come the next election, consumers and unions vote, out-of-state retail chains don't.
But the hodgepodge of a system we're left with is just plain silly. Home Depot, which carries 5 million items in a store, is item pricing in its Quincy store because it has been ordered to by a judge, but ignoring the regulations in its 24 other Massachusetts stores. Under current regulations, one supermarket can exempt 400 items of its choice from individual pricing and another store a mile away can exempt a different 400 items.
Technology has come a long way since the state's item-pricing regulations were drafted. In Connecticut, the supermarket chains have been using electronic price tags, which display the prices digitally on the shelves, rather than using item pricing since 1993. The system virtually eliminates the kind of errors that can happen when prices are attached to the product, posted on the shelves and scanned at the register. Frank Greene of Connecticut's Department of Consumer
Protection says the electronic pricing is a nonissue among consumers.
In the mid-70s check-out scanners were a hot-button consumer issue. The Globe's library is choked with stories from the era. ''Do the scanners move shoppers through the checkout counters faster? Are they accurate? Are there `bugs' in the systems?'' inquiring minds wanted to know.
Years later, long after consumers had made scanners a part of their daily lives, the nation giggled when a US president named George Bush was amazed by the wonder of the technology he saw at a grocers' convention. Technology moves on, change happens - and eventually even the pols catch up.
boston.com
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