Went to pickup an Xbox controller in the store and noticed all the barcodes on the box had the first few characters blackened out with a sharpie.
Are these refurbished/used or what's the deal here?
JB Hi-Fi selling refurbs? (Crossed out barcodes)
Lchipmunkey on 03/01/2020 - 09:30
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i don’t get it. The barcode itself was blacked out or the characters at the bottom of the bar code? Bar code scanners reads the bars and not the characters at the bottom of the bar code.
Sorry for the confusion, bits of both the barcodes and the characters at the bottom were blacked out.
Clearance item?
If by "clearance item" you mean specific units only of a product that have been reduced to clear, then yes (most likely).
If instead you mean "clearance product", i.e. when all the units of a product have been reduced to clear, then that is unlikely as a clearance price is usually just entered in the system. (If the barcode isn't in the system, then scanning it shouldn't be an issue and there's no need to disable the barcodes. The only other, highly improbable, scenarios where blacking out would be required is if the barcode incorrectly scans as another existing product or there is a bug in the software which would cause issues if the barcode were to be scanned.)
Did the box have a reduced price sticker on it or did you pay less than the ticketed price (without haggling)?
If so, then the vertical black mark through the barcodes would stop the box from scanning at the checkout (and coming up with the full retail price), forcing the sales person to look for the reduced price sticker/applying a discounted price.
This is done so that the store can sell some units of a product at a reduced price, and some at full price, without the risk of accidentally over-charging if the sales person isn't paying attention.
The most likely reason for doing this is if the item has been returned/opened, or has damaged packaging.
Ah, I did ask for a price match, could that be it?
Only indirectly. As in, they gave you a returned/opened item (which they would probably have had to sell at a reduced price anyway) instead of an unopened one. There's no reason for them to disable the barcodes after you asked for a price match.
The reason I asked about haggling (price matching included) was to determine whether or not the particular item was indeed reduced to clear. Since you haggled, we can't know this for sure.
Could be a few things
Basically, anything that would cause a stock error in the system if it scanned.