Study: One-fifth of grocery stores cheat foreigners in Prague

One out of five grocery stores in Prague cheated customers buying snacks, often by more than half the value of the purchase.

This is according to
a new study called “Cheating Customers in Grocery Stores: A Field
Study on Dishonesty,” published in the Journal of Behavioral and
Experimental Economics.

The researchers who published their findings the Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics examined 259 grocery stores in Prague, with the help of customers posing as foreigners unfamiliar with Czech currency. They shopped in both the morning in and evening and gave clerks a chance to steal money by not giving back the correct amount of change.

“The customers
were cheated in 21% of stores, the median overcharge was 54% of the
value of an average purchase, and overcharging occurred more often in
the stores with on-line reviews mentioning dishonesty of employees,”
the abstract for the study states. The result means that half of the
cases of cheating involved less than 54% of the purchase value, and
the other half was for more than that.

Men were cheated
slightly more often than women, but the gender differences were not
significant.

One interesting
finding of the study was that it contradicted a popular theory that
people are more honest in the morning, known as the “Morning
Morality Effect.” In Prague, foreigners were cheated more often in
the morning than in the evening.

“The results show
that cheating of customers in grocery stores is relatively widespread
and it is especially prevalent in the central city district where the
odds of being cheated are more than three times higher in comparison
with the rest of the city,” the abstract stated.

The study was carried out by researchers from Faculty of Business Administration at the University of Economics in Prague, the Faculty of Social and Economic Studies at J. E. Purkyně University in Ústí nad Labem, the Faculty of Social Studies at Masaryk University in Brno, and the Faculty of Science at Charles University in Prague.