Weighty Details Are Inspectors’ Stock in Trade

Wheeling a shopping cart into a Long Beach supermarket one recent day, Barbara Sparks could have been mistaken for a grandmother running her usual errands. Her face framed by bifocals, pearl earrings and graying curls, she headed straight for the meat counter, pausing to test packages of boneless rump roast, kielbasa, ground sirloin and salt pork like any choosy shopper.

But in her basket, Sparks, 60, toted a set of precision weights, a battery-powered digital scale accurate to 1/100th of an ounce and a pad of yellow violation notices that she would soon dish out.

Sparks, an investigator for the Los Angeles County Department of Weights and Measures, zeroed in on a honey-cured smoked turkey. The bird, advertised as 3.99 pounds, actually weighed in at just 3.90. Five others also came up short. Sparks slapped the meat manager with a citation and ordered him to correct the prices.

Total overcharges: $2.27.

In a world of violence, gangs and drugs, Sparks and the county’s 45 other weights investigators keep consumers from being nickeled-and-dimed to death. “I know short-weight meat doesn’t compare with murder on 2nd Street,” said Sparks, back behind the wheel of her car and off to another market. “But somebody has to protect the consumer. It all adds up, you know.”

She and her colleagues hit the streets every day to ensure that a 16-ounce loaf of bread always equals a pound, that a gallon of gas isn’t an ounce less and that foot-long wieners truly measure up.

Rarely are weights violations today as flagrant as those depicted in the 1937 film “Great Guy”--a favorite at weights and measures conventions--in which James Cagney played a crusading inspector who busts a butcher for selling chickens with pieces of lead slipped inside.

But Los Angeles County’s burgeoning population and commercial growth has produced an unprecedented number of packages to weigh, depths to gauge and sizes to measure. The effects of even minor, unintentional discrepancies--such as the price of the underweight turkeys--can quickly multiply.

Last year, weights officials estimate, they saved consumers at least $9 million in overcharges. They inspected 19,862 commercial scales, 25,711 retail gas pumps, 1,734 taxi meters and 4,268,448 packaged items. And they handed out 1,510 citations.

“It’s just too bad that the majority of the public doesn’t realize what we do,” said Nahan H. Gluck, deputy director of the department and its $1.6-million budget. “We don’t have any funds for PR people, or pet projects, or literature, or pamphlets.”

Lest he despair, Gluck can look to the poster hanging on his office wall for inspiration: “A false balance is an abomination to the Lord,” reads the biblical passage, “but a just weight is His delight.”

To large retailers, supermarkets and gas stations, the weights and measures inspectors are something of a necessary evil. While few are thrilled by violation notices, businesses generally say they appreciate the opportunity to correct their mistakes.

“It makes us aware of the need to be careful,” said Steve Koff, president of Southern California Grocers Assn., which represents 1,200 stores from Bakersfield to San Diego.

Yet since few violations are intentional--county officials estimate that 95% stem from human error--merchants sometimes complain that inspectors are too picky and unforgiving.

Take the case of Teresa Baker, a 36-year-old bakery manager snared last year for selling lemon-poppyseed muffins at less than the advertised weight. According to Baker, who was then working at a Ralphs in Santa Fe Springs, she placed the muffins in packs of four, each of which cost $2.59 and was listed at 18 ounces.

But an inspector visiting the store last August discovered 41 containers weighing an average of 16 ounces. The total overcharges were $12.08.

Baker argued that even at the light weight, the four-packs still were cheaper than buying muffins individually at 69 cents apiece. A Whittier Municipal Court judge, however, slapped her with two years of summary probation and fined the store $235.

“I try to be very conscientious,” said Baker, who now works at a Ralphs in Cerritos. “I wouldn’t sell something to the customer that I wouldn’t buy myself. Now this is on my record. It just seems unfair.”

Although inspectors don’t have to prove that a violation is intentional--evidence of the error is enough--there are cases where inaccuracies are so egregious or far-reaching that prosecutors take the step of filing civil charges.

In March, 1989, the district attorney’s office won one of its biggest such cases, a $450,457 judgment against the Kmart Corp. for consistently overcharging at its check stands. Of the 358 products purchased by undercover agents at Kmart stores in Los Angeles, Kern and Kings counties, 103 were incorrectly rung up, officials said.

The average overcharge was 11.3%.

In another case several years ago, the Coleman Co., based in Wichita, Kan., was fined $37,125 for selling 4,008 short sleeping bags at Los Angeles stores. Although the discrepancies were minute--most bags were little more than an inch short--prosecutors said those bags were the firm’s biggest sellers and they gave Coleman an unfair competitive edge.

“When you see a pattern of negligence like that it raises questions,” said Michael Delaney, head of the district attorney’s consumer protection division. “As a prosecutor I tend to get cynical when they say it’s an accident. For some reason, their accidents usually seem to favor the business, not the consumer.”

For years, the weights and measures department, founded in 1915, was able to inspect every commercial scale in the county. When officials found bogus devices, they routinely smashed them with sledgehammers and hurled them off of the Santa Monica Pier.

Today, with more than 20,000 businesses and 7 billion packaged items consumed annually in the county, inspectors say they are barely able to scratch the surface.

Officials say they target stores and service stations that have a history of problems. “We always try to zero in on the places where we’re going to have the highest impact,” said Gluck, whose department merged six years ago with the office of the county agricultural commissioner.

Pity the business that challenges evidence collected by a weights and measures inspector--for the firm soon finds itself up against the relentlessly precise world of metrology.

The weights department’s nerve center is an atmospherically controlled laboratory in South Gate. Under lock and key is a highly polished, stainless-steel cylinder that weighs 1 kilogram and is known as Los Angeles County No. 1.

Every time an inspector hands out a citation, the suspected product ultimately is compared against that kilogram, which is the standard by which all weights in the county are measured. One kilogram is equal to 2.2046 pounds.

The laboratory that contains Los Angeles County No. 1 has steel walls and its own foundation.

Due in part to the needs of the aerospace industry, which relies on precise weight measurements to calculate the thrust of rockets and airplanes, Los Angeles is the only county in the country to have a kilogram directly modeled after the U.S. standard, known as Prototype Kilogram No. 20. It is held at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Gaithersburg, Md., and used as the country’s standard for all weights for the last 100 years.

Even the Los Angeles and Gaithersburg kilograms are mere approximations of the world’s standard of a true kilogram, which is held in a vault in Sevres, France.

Inspectors have their scales calibrated to the county standard every six months. Yet despite such precision, their jobs always come down to questions of judgment.

After totaling up the violations in the meat department of the Long Beach store she was casing, inspector Barbara Sparks wheeled her cart over to the store’s bakery and began weighing loaves of oat-bran bread, hot cross buns, egg bagels and apricot muffins.

This time, it was a gooey hot fudge sundae cake that caught her eye. The chocolate dessert, it turned out, was advertised at 20 ounces, but weighed in at 19.4.

“It’s so close that I won’t take the time to write this one up,” Sparks told a visibly tense bakery manager. “But if you make some more tomorrow, maybe you ought to put on just a little bit more icing.”