Pricing pratfalls

The most implausible-sounding stories can turn out to be quite real, once you factor in, well, human stupidity. Witness this account from Snopes.com about the veracity of tales about store clerks mistakenly scanning the wrong side of a CD whose cover art shows a bar code, ring up a lower price:

In 2005, Sony BMG released a 3-CD set entitled Electric 80s. The cover art for this compilation of "the greatest Eighties electric hits" featured a reproduction of a UPC bar code, with the title "ELECTRIC 80s" placed in the space at the bottom of the bar code where the human-readable numbers corresponding to that code would usually appear. (The real bar code — the one used for scanning the price of the item at checkout counters — was placed in a corner on the back of the packaging, as it is for nearly every similar item.)

Unfortunately for some retailers (such as Tesco supermarkets), the machine-readable version of the bar code used for the CD compilation's cover art was scannable by their systems, and sales clerks at those outlets who mistakenly passed the CD's cover (rather than its back) over point-of-purchase scanners ended up ringing up sales for £9.77, (US $17.46) considerably less than the set's listed price of £14.97 (US $26.76). Often the mis-scanning resulted in stores' mistakenly recording sales of singer Jack Johnson's new (and significantly less expensive) CD, In Between Dreams, instead. ...