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History
- Referred to consumer protection
Full text
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BILL NUMBER:S2997
Title of bill
An act to amend the general business law, in relation to posting the cost of products
Purpose or general idea of bill
To establish violations for venues that fail to properly charge consumers at point of sale consistent with the price listed at the product display in the venue.
Summary of provisions
Subdivision 1: Defines venues that will be subject to this law and the manner in which pricing must be displayed.
Subdivision 2: Establishes that charging a consumer in excess of the marked price constitutes a violation.
Subdivision 3: Failure to properly display price as established in section 1 will constitute a violation.
Subdivision 4: Defines consumers redress to a violation of subdivision 2.
Subdivision 5: Establishes that failure to display pricing will result in, at a minimum, a fine of five hundred for the first violation, one thousand for a second violation and two thousand five hundred dollars for subsequent violations.
Subdivision 6: Establishes that each day an applicable venue is in breach of subdivision 1 or 2 will constitute a separate violation.
Subdivision 7: None of the following subdivisions will apply when a violation is incurred by human error that is subsequently remedied at the point of sale.
Justification
The New York City Department of Consumer Affairs (DCA) found that compliance declined from last year's low of 48 percent down to only 41 percent. Last year, DCA announced that its inspection of 983 supermarkets throughout the five boroughs resulted in having to issue violations in 516 of those inspections. DCA inspectors this year conducted 1,980 supermarket inspections and had to issue violations in 1,162 of those inspections, with total fines assessed of close to a million dollars.
Inspectors check for accurate pricing, proper taxing of products, and accuracy of scales and scanners, all of which affect New Yorkers' wallets at the check-out counter.
This year doubling the number of inspections and thus doubling that 'cost of doing business' still was not enough to get the City's super- markets to get it right at their check-out counters. Public pressure hasn't worked, doubling enforcement activity hasn't worked, and so there is an impetus for this bill, which would both give overcharged consumers
ten times the amount they were overcharged and that item for free, and also triple current fines."
In the past year's inspections the most common violations were for fail- ure to mark proper quantities and provide required accountability infor- mation on food packaged in the store, adding tax to items that are not taxable, charging the wrong prices at check-out scanners, failing to affix price tags on individual items, and maintaining inaccurate scales or failing to make scales available to customers for products sold by weight.
Under this Act, every time a consumer is overcharged, they would get both ten times the amount of the overcharge and that item for free. Both Connecticut and Michigan have similar, successful laws on their books, and customer payback is a standard industry best practice.
Second, the Act would triple existing fines.
Legislative history
No prior bill.
Fiscal implications
None.
Effective date
This act shall take effect 90 days after it shall have become a law.
Summaries, headlines and scores are AI-generated from the official bill text. How we score bills. Source: NYS Open Legislation.