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Opinion: City attorney says Ralphs had its thumb on the scale; a thumbs-up for asking the question

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The city attorney’s office, of all agencies, may have been asking itself the same weird, nobody-thinks-this-but-me questions that have popped into my head as I troll the aisles of that well-known crime scene, the grocery store.

Carmen Trutanich’s office has filed dozens of criminal counts against Ralphs grocery and its parent company, Kroger. The offense? Allegedly overcharging on prepackaged and weighed food such as salads, fish, fried chicken and bulk coffee.

The stores were allegedly charging customers not just for the food but for the weight of the package, and even for the ice glaze on frozen food.

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I was gobsmacked when I read my colleague Andrea Chang’s story.

These are precisely the things I’ve wondered as I stood at the build-a-salad bar, wielding the tongs above the beet bin and the broccoli tray: How much does this takeout container weigh? Do they charge me for it? Should I bring my own recyclable container? Would they take that into account on the weigh-in scale?

Same for the ice: Does that 12-ounce label include the frozen water I can sometimes hear tinkling around inside the package?

What I thought were dilemmas fit only for a ‘Seinfeld’ episode turn out to be the stuff of a criminal complaint, based on what ‘secret shopper’ inspectors from the county’s weights and measures department say they found at 14 Ralphs stores this year.

These are also pretty much the very same offenses that Ralphs was fined more than $15,000 for over the last two years. The natural impulse is to wonder, why would a company (again allegedly) keep doing the same thing over and over again, if it could get into trouble?

And the answer is … profit outweighs penalties. Think oil companies. Think Enron. Fines can be a nuisance cost of doing business compared with the money that can be made by drawing out the lines of the law in the first place.

‘A huge ripoff,’ said the deputy city attorney, Don Cocek, especially if you multiply the number of incidents times the number of stores times 365 days a year. ‘Ralphs is taking money out of their customers’ pockets. It might just be 95 cents, but if you add that up ... ‘

He lost me on ‘just’ 95 cents. That’s not a ‘just.’ That’s almost a dollar. That’s two first-class stamps, a small fast-food fries or a half-bottle of Two-Buck Chuck. A grapefruit, or an avocado, or a beefsteak tomato, and change.

The fact that this was also filed against the parent company, Kroger, was a knife-in-the-gut reminder that yet another Southern California mercantile institution – in this case, Ralphs -- was sold off to a national corporation. Remember May Co.?

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And then, as if I needed another reminder of our fleeting historical memory, here’s this one. Ralphs was founded in L.A. more than 130 years ago by George Ralphs. That’s his name: Ralphs. With an S.

The city attorney’s news release repeatedly misspells the name of the grocery store chain as ‘Ralph’s.’ With an apostrophe. In spite of the big red signs over the doors of the stores. In spite of 130-some years of history.

Can Ralphs get off on a technicality for that?

-- Patt Morrison

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