Posted on 12/10/2007 10:08:19 AM PST by John Cena
(AP) Dozens of drivers made a mad rush for cheap gas after a station employee accidentally changed the price to 33 cents a gallon.
An employee closing Trig's Minocqua Shell for the night mistakenly entered the price of a gallon of gasoline as 32.9 cents instead of $3.299 on Monday night.
He left about 10 p.m., but drivers could still use their credit cards to buy gas.
Word of the bargain spread fast in the rural northern Wisconsin community, with 42 people buying 586 gallons of gas in an hour and 45 minutes. One person had pumped 27 gallons and two purchased 18 gallons.
Local police saw the horde at the station and called store manager Andrea Reuland, who went to the station and pushed the emergency stop.
"There were cars two deep at each of my pumps," said Reuland, who knew many of the drivers and told them they were being dishonest _ the main store sign had the correct price.
"I was very upset that there's that many dishonest people," she said. "They knew there was a problem, and they took advantage of an employee's mistake and I think that's terrible."
The employee, who has been there for about six months, had changed the gas prices 25 times in the past six months.
"It was an honest mistake," Reuland said. "I could have done it."
Area residents were still talking about it Friday morning.
"Was it you guys?" a woman in the station asked Reuland. "Why do I always miss the good stuff?"
That's not a law, that's a courtesy extended by the store. On the flip side, signs that say "you break it, you buy it" are not legally enforceable either.
There’s a sign!!?!? ;)
12 years ago I went to Home Depot to buy a hospital grade 20 amp duplex and a weatherproof outside single box as I was wiring a 30 amp protected circuit about 25 feet using #10 Romex from the panel to the outside wall.
It was to be used to power a motor home using a 100 foot #10 power cord housing a 30 amp protected panel.
When I went to check out, the clerk started to ring up 59 cents for the duplex since it was white in color like the typical contractor 15 amp grade.
When I informed her that she was costing the store a bunch of pennies she called a manager who said that if it was 20 amp it should be grey and would cost $5.00; I said, “No, it is actually $15.00” and it was clearly marked as to its purpose and price on the shelf where I picked it up.
Still not satisfied, he wouldn’t relent until I took him back to the shelf and pointed out the SKU along with the model and designation specs.
This was not just my sense of honesty at work, I had already been here in Nashville long enough to realize that there wasn’t a clerk in a single store of my experience who was on the right side of the counter.
After all this time my opinion hasn’t changed.
Many times errors in pricing cannot be changed at the store level. Prices are determined by the data entered via the scan of the UPC and the price assigned. Registers will have a discount key/code not an ‘upprice.’ In an automated system, like a gas station after store hours, the retailer is at the mercy of the automated program. Was there not a double or triple check price change feature for the clerk to verify that the correct price had infact been entered...
I got it from Guy Clark and it’s credited to him on the Dance Quotes page.
Try again.
No, it's pretty much divided in half. WI comes off so liberal because Milwaukee and Madison (a.k.a. Berkeley of the Mid-West) are liberal cesspools.
U.S. President -- Wisconsin
|
||||
| Candidates | Votes | % | ||
 John F. Kerry (D) |
1,488,935 | 50 | ||
 George W. Bush * (R) |
1,477,122 | 49 | ||
| Other |
26,333 | 1 | ||
That's not a law, that's a courtesy extended by the store. On the flip side, signs that say "you break it, you buy it" are not legally enforceable either.
Thank you.
What are dissicants, dried up complainers?
“Stealing for Salvation”? LOL
“Unethical is true, but, I don’t think it is stealing.”
I certainly don’t think it was stealing, by the legal definition of the word.
Many people, including some here, apparently don’t think it was unethical, either. I’m not one of them. And I don’t even expect to be rewarded or punished for it in the afterlife - I just don’t like to knowingly hurt other people, even if it’s as a result of their own mistake.
Just another way to look at it...what if someone change the neon (which we all know to be plastic sheeting) sign. A rush happens and the store owner says, no the price is programmed at the pump. Mistakes happen...and sometimes they are costly. I question if there was any ‘check’ of the system built into the program.
Actually, this is another of the problems with credit-card economy.
You “don’t notice”.
Exactly like you “don’t notice” how much of your income goes to taxes because of automatic “withholding” every pay check.
We are so in the dark with all this technology.
LOL! Yes, but they will be distroyed. It’s their distiny!
What would you do if they’d charged the customers $32 a gallon instead??
According to your premise, that would just be ok too, right?
Anytime you’ve got three people in an AH Sprite, somebody’s going to get pumped.
In NY, it is not merely a courtesy, they are required BY LAW, to sell you the item at the price as marked on the individual item.
There are no soup recipes in MY armoire!
So government sets the price of oil? That's news to me...
Again - people were lined up like the gas-price-fixing days. They knew damn well what was going on when the price was just 10% of the (posted) real price/average price in the middle of the night with no attendants.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.