We purchased a set of DVDs for a gift this past week and got home to discover the price label was UNDER the outside shrink wrap.

It’s clear in this case the store has not thought about the transaction from the customer’s point of view!

DVDs would be a common gift item so it’s not as though you could reason that 99% of purchases are for non-gift purposes. I’d hazard to guess, but perhaps a quarter or third of such purchases would end up as gifts.

So we have the dilemma of taking off the shrink wrap to remove the price tag — which then lowers the value of the gift for the receipient, as it looks like it has been opened (and is probably not permitted in the store’s return policy, although I don’t that policy would stand up to scrutiny). OR we can just cover the price tag to leave the shrink wrap in place (which means the price is still under the shrink wrap and could be viewable later.

(As it was a gift for my grandmother, we opted to leave on the shrink wrap, just in case she already had the four DVDs we had selected).

Maybe having the price tag under the shrink wrap prevents customers from trying to change or alter the tag, and is a security measure — but there are other obvious options (barcode scanning for one, tamper-proof tags as well) that would better suit a gift-giving purpose.

This strategy also makes it more difficult for staff to change the price should that be required (although mostly a second tag should be added for a price reduction to show the savings value and that the price was originally higher).

Having a full “walk-through” of the transaction would have revealed the issue and help improve the store’s overall perception.