Old school price tags requirements create redundant expense for retailers and higher prices for consumers

By David Wyld, Contributing Editor

This morning, you can take a time travel adventure without leaving your desk. We can go “back to the future,” to the grocery store of our Baby Boomer youth. There, you can pick-up a can of beans with a price sticker that reads sixty-nine cents. Then you can take that can to the checkout line, and a real, live it price manually on her register.

Believe it or not, for many this scenario is not a dream in the year 2007. Rather, it is a very real nightmare for retailers. In a significant part of the United States, grocery stores – and many other categories of retail stores – must still place individual price tags on almost every item they sell. This is because of state and local laws, commonly referred to as “item pricing laws” (IPLs). These regulations were largely enacted as consumer protection measures in the 1970s and 1980s to protect against overcharging due to checkout scanning errors.