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Grocery store cashier from Sweden calling in...
The store I work in has 13000+ different items in stock which is probably not a lot compared to an average US superstore. There are three different databases with the barcodes and prices and stuff. The central database sends out price updates and campaigns to all the store databases in the nation, while the individual store databases keep track of the inventory of the specific store and sends out data to the registers. With 13000 items, even an error of .1% means a bunch of items.
Every Monday morning an update is sent from central with all the campaigns for this week. Theoretically. There is an ad leaflet going out weekly and we also get sales tags and signs to put up in the store. For some reason there are hardly ever any significant errors in the leaflets or the tags, but there are almost always errors in the database update. In my store we used to have one cashier come in early on Monday morning to collect and scan all items on campaign to catch these errors before the store opened, but due to cutbacks we don't do that anymore. Instead, as soon as a customer discovers an error we try to get someone to correct it in our local database.
But it doesn't end there. Sometimes our corrections disappear. Mystery!
I suspect it's because our database is getting force-synched with the central every once in a while to keep the local managers from diverging from the ordained prices.
It annoys us to no end, all these problems. Customers get angry (rightfully so!) and we have to spend hours on giving back money and hunting down people who can change the prices in the database. I daresay the checkout "fraud" is not a conscious effort, because seriously, we can't even keep up with the stuff we're supposed to do. Organising a huge mofo fraud on top of that? Nah. The store workers and computer monkeys are too over-worked and the management is too impractical.
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