[jkaplowitz]

It's not about adjudicating disputes in an arbitrary sense, it's about enforcing consumer protection laws about prices displayed and then charged at retail. Many places legislate that the lower of shelf or scanner price be the maximum price charged.

[gruez]

>It's not about adjudicating disputes in an arbitrary sense, it's about enforcing consumer protection laws about prices displayed and then charged at retail.

This is a fundamental misunderstanding of how the legal system works, at least for common law ones. When cops "enforce" the law, like arresting someone or towing a car, they're only allowed to do it because there's some immediate need. In the former case, it's because having a criminal roaming around the streets is a danger to society, and in the latter case because the car is blocking traffic and needs to be removed. In both cases you still need a judge to ruled that the person actually shoplifted or parked illegally. None of these factors apply in a dispute over pricing, and it's not the police's job to strongarm the shopkeeper to accept the lower-marked price. Indeed, in the two examples, there are often cases where no actions are taken at all, for instance issuing a summons instead of arresting someone, or issuing a ticket instead of towing a car.

[jkaplowitz]

> When cops "enforce" the law, like arresting someone or towing a car, they're only allowed to do it because there's some immediate need.

Not at all true. They can enforce the law because there's a law being violated, not because there's an immediate need for the enforcement.

> In the former case, it's because having a criminal roaming around the streets is a danger to society, and in the latter case because the car is blocking traffic and needs to be removed.

There are so many cases where cops can arrest someone who isn't being a danger to society in any way, like someone who illegally crossed the border into the US (a criminal misdemeanor) and is otherwise fully law-abiding. Or for an example under state law, a cop arresting someone who is intentionally underpaying state income tax (criminal tax evasion) has no immediate need to take that person into custody before conviction but is 100% allowed to do so if probable cause exists, at least until the initial bail hearing.

> In both cases you still need a judge to ruled that the person actually shoplifted or parked illegally.

Not before a cop gets involved, no. The judge comes after the cop.

> None of these factors apply in a dispute over pricing, and it's not the police's job to strongarm the shopkeeper to accept the lower-marked price. Indeed, in the two examples, there are often cases where no actions are taken at all, for instance issuing a summons instead of arresting someone, or issuing a ticket instead of towing a car.

This has nothing to do with strongarming the shopkeeper to accept a lower-marked price in the sense of an ordinary pricing dispute between private parties, it's about enforcing state or local laws that regulate this in cases where a shop is violating applicable laws.

It is true that many of these laws only allow administrative fines in response to complaints or inspections, not anything as proactive as I was describing. The theoretical viability of my idea of simply leaving with the item after paying the legal maximum price at the cash register and involving the cops if stopped actually depends on state contract law, and likely specifically its judicial precedents: if that state would view the buyer's offer to buy at the shelf price as accepted on the terms of the store's invitation to treat since the counteroffer from the cash register's scanner was illegal, then title transfers to the buyer at the time of payment and an attempt to stop them from leaving would be a crime that the cops could in theory be called for. If the state would view the buyer's offer to buy be rejected even though the counteroffer was itself illegal, then yeah the only available enforcement is the administrative complaint / inspection / fine procedure and the buyer never gains title to the property. I expect this legal conclusion would vary from one state to another.

I think we all agree that this theoretical option is very rarely practical, and I'm not pretending otherwise.

[gruez]

>There are so many cases where cops can arrest someone who isn't being a danger to society in any way, like someone who illegally crossed the border into the US (a criminal misdemeanor)

Does only committing a "criminal misdemeanor" somehow exempt you from arrest?

>Or for an example under state law, a cop arresting someone who is intentionally underpaying state income tax (criminal tax evasion) has no immediate need to take that person into custody before conviction but is 100% allowed to do so if probable cause exists, at least until the initial bail hearing.

Right, because arresting people who refuses to show up to court is needed for the justice system to work at all. Otherwise people can just shirk their court dates and never face judgement. There's plenty of other reasons to arrest people besides the two examples I provided, they're not supposed to be exhaustive.

>This has nothing to do with strongarming the shopkeeper to accept a lower-marked price in the sense of an ordinary pricing dispute between private parties, it's about enforcing state or local laws that regulate this in cases where a shop is violating applicable laws.

This makes as much sense as calling in the cops to report health code violations.

[jkaplowitz]

> Does only committing a "criminal misdemeanor" somehow exempt you from arrest?

It does not - and that's exactly my point! Cops are allowed to arrest that criminal even though there's no immediate need to arrest them. So, immediate need is not a prerequisite to cops arresting someone.

> Right, because arresting people who refuses to show up to court is needed for the justice system to work at all. Otherwise people can just shirk their court dates and never face judgement. There's plenty of other reasons to arrest people besides the two examples I provided, they're not supposed to be exhaustive.

Yes, but cops are also free to arrest people who they are confident will show up to court, if there's probable cause that they've committed a crime. Again, the point of that example was that immediate need is not required before a cop can arrest someone.

> This makes as much sense as calling in the cops to report health code violations.

I agree that it would be best if there were a separate agency that could respond on the spot for this type of issue, other than the regular police department and other than a slow administrative complaint/inspection process which doesn't lead to enough of a fine for stores to change their processes.

But I was discussing the possibility of the sale completing according to the law and the store trying to stop the customer from leaving with their purchase because they didn't pay the illegal overcharge. That would indeed by a crime attempted or committed by the store, assuming the law considers the sale to have been completed, and that is indeed something within the scope of what cops can handle.

To use your health code analogy: sure, in general, administrative complaints are the way to handle health code violations. But what do you call it if a restaurant worker sees something which they know or reasonably should know is toxic to humans spill into a customer's order, and then they serve it to the customer anyway without a warning? Yes, that's a crime as well as a health code violation. There are plenty of cases where cops can legitimately be involved in things that can also be handled administratively. Whether or not cops are likely to respond in useful or timely ways is a completely separate question from what the law allows.

(Tangent: Cops also quite often handle administrative fines of even smaller magnitude than what we're discussing here, but usually when the aggrieved party is the government and the wrongdoer is a random individual, like issuing non-criminal $60-100 fines for not paying a public transit fare of a couple of dollars. It's rare for them to do it when the aggrieved party is a random individual and the wrongdoer is a business.)