Price Check

Author: Joseph Sandoval

I checked the Wildblue Price last week to make sure my bill was correct because this is a new habit I have tried to keep with. A few weeks before Christmas, I read an article about the importance of checking receipts when you go shopping at local retailers. It seems that people rarely do this anymore. How often do you go to dinner with your family, and when the bill comes, you just automatically reach for your credit or debit card without even reviewing the bill? I happened to take a second to look at my bill once at a restaurant we tend to frequent. I was shocked to find that we had been charged for four drinks when we had actually all ordered water. This was nearly a ten dollar addition to our bill that I probably would not have ever caught. This particular article I read about holiday shopping was pointing out that cashiers were adding a “cash back” amount to a bill, and some customers never caught this until well after the fact. Cashiers would simply add this to the total, and then pocket the difference from the actual paid merchandise. The retailer itself would be none the wiser because at the end of the day, the drawer would balance. The difference was the cash was going into the pocket of the cashier, not the customer.