Ralphs Chain Admits Overcharging : Consumers: Supermarket’s plea bargain concedes some sale items were improperly marked. It says expired shelf tags were left out inadvertently.

Ralphs Grocery Co. admitted in court Tuesday that it cheated customers at San Fernando Valley supermarkets by overcharging them for items that were marked as being on sale.

In a plea bargain with prosecutors entered in Van Nuys Municipal Court, the supermarket chain agreed to conduct price-accuracy training program for employees and to pay $3,500 in fines.

Ralphs, the third-largest grocery chain in Southern California, also pledged to change its shelf tags to reflect the date a sale price expires.

The criminal charges stemmed from undercover shopping trips by investigators from the county Department of Weights and Measures. The department said that nearly 20% of the time, checkout scanning machines, which read computerized bar codes printed on items and match them to prices programmed in the computer memory, charged the investigators more than the shelf price displayed for the same item.

The supermarket chain blamed unintentional oversights, saying it failed to update the shelf price tags on some items when the sale price was changed in the computer.

Deputy City Atty. Donald Cocek, who prosecuted the case, said the investigation focused on the 2,500 items that a typical Ralphs store labels as “Price Breaker” items on its shelf tags, not the 150 to 200 items that are advertised weekly in newspapers.

Price Breaker items, which are changed frequently and vary from store to store, represent about 10% of the items available in an average supermarket, Ralphs officials said.

The county investigators filed a report with the court saying that they were charged more than the posted price on 26 Price Breaker items purchased at seven Valley stores between December and March.

In addition to 26 counts of overcharging on Price Breakers, the chain also was charged with two counts of short-weighting bakery items at an eighth Ralphs store.

City Atty. James K. Hahn said earlier that based on the undercover investigation, prosecutors felt there were “more inaccuracies at Ralphs” than at other supermarket outlets.

But Jan Charles Gray, Ralphs general counsel, said Tuesday that “in our view, there never was a problem at Ralphs. The only problem is that sometimes the sale price is left on the shelf after it expires.”

Although that would occasionally mislead a shopper, there was no systematic overcharging, he said.

He said that county inspectors had “figured out our code and then went and selected those items that had expired Price Breaker tags. That’s how they got that 20% error rate,” which he said was not representative.

He said that if Ralphs stores actually had a 20% error rate on sale items, “We would be out of business. It’s preposterous.”

Weights and Measures officials have denied they sought out items on which they knew the sale price had expired. They said they merely picked out items that large numbers of shoppers buy and that were marked as being on sale.

If convicted on all 28 counts, the grocery chain could have been fined a maximum of $7,100, Cocek said.

Under the plea bargain, prosecutors dismissed 22 counts in return for Ralphs’ plea of no contest--the legal equivalent of a guilty plea for criminal court purposes--on six counts.

The city attorney’s office estimated that Ralphs would spend $1 million in training and equipment changes to meet terms of the plea-bargain agreement. But Gray said that the changes are “things we were already doing. They were not affected by this case.”