Missouri Attorney General: Walgreen Co. Deceiving Consumers
By JIM SUHR
AP Business Writer
ST. LOUIS (AP) -- Walgreen Co.'s persisting failure to remove expired sales tags from its shelves deceives customers and violates a 2014 settlement that sought to resolve the matter in Missouri, the state's attorney general argued Tuesday in asking a state court to punish the pharmacy chain.
Attorney General Chris Koster filed court documents asking a judge to hold the nation's largest pharmacy retailer in contempt of the settlement and issue steeper fines, including up to $5,000 for each expired tag. Koster said that since July, undercover investigators have found a total of more than 1,300 shelf tags displaying sales prices that had expired in all but one of 50 Walgreen stores.
Koster said the lapsed tags subjected customers to unwittingly being overcharged and ran afoul of the company's promise to remove the tags within 12 hours of their expiration. Two of the tags had expired in 2013, he said.
"Consumers should not have to dig through outdated and incorrect information to find the true price of an item," Koster said in announcing his latest legal filings against the company, based in the Chicago suburb of Deerfield, Illinois. He called the expired sales tags "a flagrant defiance of the court's order."
"I believe the problem is rooted in negligence. I don't believe they care," Koster added. "This has become institutionalized as a marketing technique for Walgreens, and it is outrageous."
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