Woolworths shopper’s urgent warning about self-serve checkout glitch
A Woolworths shopper has urged customers to be vigilant at the self-service checkout after being charged eight times for a coloring book.
Bek, 33, was shocked to discover her bill was an abnormally high $80 after scanning just a few items at her local Woolworths on Tuesday.
She discovered she had been charged $48 for a $6 Gabby Dollhouse coloring book for her son.
The young mother shared her experience on TikTok to warn other shoppers of how easily they can overpay.
“You need to be extremely careful when shopping at Woolworths… and I recommend checking absolutely everything you scan,” Bek said.
“We have a pencil book… as you can see, number 8 for $6 each [which came to] $48. We scanned one and will scan up to 8 [times].
“If we hadn’t known the price was $48, we would have paid $48 for a $6 book.”
“I called the staff and they tried to enter it manually but it kept changing to eight. They couldn’t figure out why,” she said Yahoo News.
Dozens of Aussies said they had experienced the same problem at other Woolworths stores, with some discovering the fault too late.
“That’s exactly what happened to me… it was a coloring book with pencils,” one person wrote.
“The exact same thing happened to me but I didn’t notice it until I left,” someone else wrote.
“Happened to me at Big W. Scanned an $18 item for $168, done, all codes changed nothing,” a third added.
Others explained that the error occurs when the wrong amount is entered by staff during the inventory phase.
“I work at Woolies, it’s a barcode problem… it’s not a problem known to those on the shop floor, but to those in the store offices when they set up barcodes,” one person wrote.
“It’s a barcode error. The barcode on the device probably registers as a box,” another person wrote.
A Coles shopper said they had experienced a similar problem.
Bek, 33, (pictured) said if she hadn’t double checked the price she had to pay for the coloring book, she would have paid $48 for the $6 item
‘That happened to me at Coles. I was given a monstrous energy drink, just one can, and it turned out to be a pack of four,” one person wrote.
Several commenters thanked Bek for pointing out the problem and reminded them to be alert for unusual prices at the checkout.
The young mother says the outage has made her more careful when shopping and that she would like to see more checkout staff in stores.
Others urged shoppers to check their receipts before leaving a supermarket.
A Woolworths spokesperson told Daily Mail Australia the glitch was an “isolated issue” related to the barcode on the pencil sets sold in stores.
“The scanning error on this barcode has now been corrected to ensure that this does not happen again,” the spokesperson said.
“We are pleased to see that our team was able to quickly resolve this issue at the store and that the customer was charged only the correct amount.”
Daily Mail Australia has contacted Coles for further comment.