The Fight Against Crime: Notes From the Front : Balancing the Scales for the Shopper

They don’t carry guns. They don’t get followed around by people toting cameras for reality-based TV shows. Their undercover operations are decidedly unsexy, low-key affairs that take place in supermarkets. And worse yet, hardly anyone besides produce managers ever talks about them.

If the inspectors at the county’s Quality Control Division of the Weights and Measures Department didn’t know it before, they certainly do now: checking the accuracy of supermarket price scanners--in addition to meat, produce and bakery scales--is not exactly the kind of crime busting that brings fame.

“We have always worked in the shadows,” says Joe Jamora, the boss of the somewhat obscure division, which is made up of 10 inspectors. “No notoriety. All we do is call it like we find it.”

But anonymity sometimes leads toward extinction. This year’s budget, for instance, is $800,000, down from a high of $1.2 million a few years ago, Jamora said. The division has resisted layoffs, but has been able to spend less time performing inspections.

Luckily though, the division’s three-person undercover team became famous recently. Well, sort of famous. What happened is that one of their operations made it into the news. Here’s the story: On April 7, as the result of the division’s three-month investigation, the Los Angeles city attorney’s office filed criminal charges against 10 Ralphs supermarkets for allegedly overcharging customers. Seven of the stores were located in the San Fernando Valley.

The charges stem from inaccurate prices read by the supermarkets’ computerized scanners. According to a three-month investigation, those prices were often higher than the items’ posted shelf prices.

The problem, the market managers and investigators agree, is a common one. It usually happens when the stores fail to reprogram their scanners to reflect the price of an item that has been placed on sale. Ralphs, which will be arraigned on the charges next month, has blamed the problem on store clerks’ forgetting to remove sale tags from items that had reverted back to normal prices. Al Marasca, the chain’s president, said the problem has been corrected.

Prosecutors in the city attorney’s office said they do not believe the stores are intentionally trying to rip off their customers. The violations are often for less than $1.

Not exactly high stakes, but according to Jamora, significant nonetheless.

“The overcharges appear small, but average out to be about 10% of the cost of each item,” Jamora said. “That’s substantial.”

Indeed, according to the investigation of Ralphs, the scanners are inaccurate almost 16% of the time and overcharge customers almost 15% of the time. But because the division has only three inspectors and the county has some 20,000 markets, catching violators is not easy.

During sting operations, the inspectors wear street clothes, grab a shopping cart and do what comes naturally. “They pick up the items that seem attractive to them, but we focus on the sale items because that’s what the public focuses on too,” Jamora said.

After the undercover shoppers choose 20 sample items, they wait in the check-out line like everyone else.

Jamora said it is important for inspectors not to identify themselves, lest they be the unwitting victims of the store’s chicanery.

“If they know you’re an inspector, employees will go following you around, changing the prices after you go to the next aisle,” he said. “And when you go back to verify the shelf prices, it looks like you’ve been imagining things.”

Only after the items have been rung up do inspectors identify themselves. If there are variations between shelf prices and those on the scanner, they issue the supermarket a citation.

For now, the leader of the small division is hoping its fame--however fleeting--will help stave off job losses and possibly the elimination of the entire department. “Of course everybody is suffering from lack of funding, but I hope some of this publicity will help,” Jamora said. After all, he said, “It would be easier for people to want to eliminate us if you didn’t know what we did.”

Still, fame has its downside, and the new attention has led to at least one case of overexposure. “One of the TV stations decided to follow one of our undercover people around,” said Jamora. “Now, when she goes into supermarkets, people tell her, ‘I saw you on TV again last night.”’