A new kind of advertisement is drawing the eyes of shoppers and the ire of shopkeepers by publicizing Los Angeles County businesses that have overcharged customers.
With county inspectors being overcharged at about 25% of the stores they visit, 8 1/2-by-11-inch signs known as overcharge conviction notices have begun cropping up in the front windows of offending stores from San Dimas to Marina del Rey. By county decree, they must hang there for 60 days.
The notices are the newest component of an ongoing effort by the county to ensure pricing accuracy at retail stores, said Jeff Humphreys, deputy director of the Agricultural Commissioner/Weights and Measures Department.
The department is counting on the deterrent value of the notices to encourage accurate pricing without unleashing an army of undercover inspectors across the county's 4,081 square miles.
"The intent is to make an impression on stores and make them not want to have the signs in their windows," Humphreys said.
Some business owners and their representatives say the public notices are an unduly harsh penalty for what are usually minor overcharges, and that consumers are misled by the long delays between violations and the appearance of the signs reporting the transgressions.
"It's just another bureaucratic program," said Gilbert Canizales, director of local government relations for the California Grocers' Assn., whose members include the Ralphs, Vons and Albertsons supermarket chains. "The procedure they're using is not only not fair but not indicative of how accurate prices are."
Although the ordinance requiring the notices applies to any business with a cash register, Humphreys said enforcement efforts have focused on the 8,300 businesses in the county that use electronic price scanners because the devices make it more difficult for consumers to keep track of prices.
"Checkers used to call out prices, but now everything just flies over the scanner," Humphreys said. "There's no way" for the consumer to quickly spot a mistake.
Modeled after the county's popular system of publicly grading restaurants, the overcharge notice program was introduced in 2001 by Supervisor Gloria Molina after she said she had been overcharged at a Macy's and a Kmart.
In a study Molina subsequently ordered, county inspectors were overcharged at 67 of 108 stores they visited, according to Humphreys, and on more than 10% of the items purchased.
