Supermarket Price Tags Not Accurate!

[ajoknoblauch]

also, another angle of the problem can be that multinationals, the international capitals that come to Argentina (and to the third world in general) want a lot more of gain than in their home country (where everything is more regulated and you have a strong state to stop them). There are lots of multinational corporations that make their main gain in the third world. Maybe we have weak states because they gain that much, or maybe they gain that much because we have weak states... its dialectical.. what surely happens is that they dont like at all any attempt of a big state, something similar to its own countries.

Except...Argentina has a huge state apparatus that sticks its fingers into just about everything (including the pockets of multinational corporations).

 

[Matiasba]

Except...Argentina has a huge state apparatus that sticks its fingers into just about everything (including the pockets of multinational corporations).

Nope. Argentina has a weak state compared to Europe and US (and China, India, Australia, etc) Whatever project of becoming bigger, these people, the people that hold the economic power, make a great fuss, and start with their right wing speech "achicar el Estado es agrandar la Nacion"...

Theres always a negotiation between this corporate power and a small state like Argentina. Always. As I said, they want a small state, and they make a small state with their policies. For instance Carrefour gaining a lot more here than everywhere (look at this note on a blog) pushing up prices.... these corporations are important economic actors, and they are an interested part in, for instance, inflation problem. Some of them have even more power than a state, like the banks in 2001, or steal from us citizens, like IBM or Siemens (not by accident happened those in the 90s, with a small state and the speech of "private is better than public" being in style)... see? always negotiation with the State.

 

[camino no tomado]

I don't want to burst any bubbles, but the phenomenon of supermarket checkout scanner "irregularities" is global--not unique to Argentina, Latin American or any other region. If you think you can trust the scanners in any "first world" country, you are deluding yourself and/or not watching closely enough. As someone said about Seattle, small time crime and petty fraud are extraordinarily rare in Canada. In my own experience of dozens of countries, only Singapore may have had even fewer issues of that kind. But sadly, scanner irregularities are absolutely rampant.

All my life I was an inattentive shopper. Life was too short for anything other than tossing what I wanted into the cart and paying whatever the register said before leaving. But then I got educated by the world's savviest shopper, my ex-wife. And sure enough, now that I have to shop for myself again, I catch scanner discrepancies on at least every other trip to the supermarket (and it doesn't matter which one, from the super discounters up to the Whole Foods types). I realize what a challenge it is to achieve 100% accuracy when maintaining a giant database of constantly fluctuating prices--and I'd love to believe that all these errors are just down to a lack of diligence or competence, however in the dozens of times I've spotted one (and brought it to the cashier's attention) only once was the error actually in my favour.

It's very likely that you're more aware of scanner fraud in Argentina because it fits into a perceived (or most likely real) pattern of general corruption, but this specific problem is not indigenous.