Yesterday's Prices

What to do for supper tonight was my topmost thoughts as I left work today and headed to my favourite food store, Woolworths. Yes I know food is quite pricey at Woolworths but for the quality I must say it is all worth it. I was on a tight budget and thought I should do a spaghetti bolognaise which should suit my pocket quite nicely, thank you.

I do apologise for the math in this post but it is all worth it in the end. So here I was I was at the closest Woolies near my work checking the prices, looking for specials which Woolworths have every now and again to get their prices comparative. But little did I know that I would get the mince at yesterday’s prices. At the meat section and found that the 1kg lean beef mince was marked down by R20.00 on promotion from R79.99 to R59.99. At R59.99 per kg made it about the same as most other grocery stores around here so I started looking for a good looking pack and stumbled upon one that said R44.99 instead of R59.99, uhmm someone couldn’t do their math as this was a saving of R35 not R20. I then looked to see if it was not old stock but the sell by date was all the same 28/11/15 this Saturday, still fine to me as I am going to cook it tonight. A bargain, sadly there was only one pack marked incorrect, I looked.

Arriving at the till, the teller scanned my trolley of groceries and as expected the 1 kg lean beef mince was scanned as R79.99 minus R20.00 which made it R59.99. I then queried that the price said R44.99 on the packaging, so the teller called the supervisor. I explained that I knew that somehow there was a wrong calculation but the price did say R44.99. The supervisor then said she will need to escalate it and called a more senior supervisor. In the meanwhile another staff member started to argue that it was a 2kg pack of mince not a 1kg which still didn’t make sense R44.99 x 2 = R89.98 – R20 = R69.98 and not the R59.99 showing up on the till. By this time the more senior supervisor arrived and who then took one look at the price on the packaging and said to the junior supervisor to charge the customer R44.99 just as it stated on the packaging. Kudos to the Woolworths senior supervisor who did the right thing even though it was a blatant mistake.

When I arrived home, I doubled checked my till slip to make sure that Woolworths did charge me R44.99. It was then that I saw that the price was entered into the till as R44.99 and the system then minused the R20 promo and gave me the 1kg lean beef mince at R24.99. Wow a saving of R55! And there you have it folks, it just goes to show that it pays to check prices when shopping as you will never know when you will pay at yesterday’s prices even at Woolies.