The City of Philadelphia is considering a plan that aims to punish store owners for selling expired medicines, baby food or dairy products. Right, now if you return an expired product (that you just purchased) stores only have to exchange the product or give you a refund. This bill goes a step further.

Here’s how it would work. Say you go to your local drug store and buy a bottle of aspirin. When you get home you discover that it’s a month past the expiration date. Under the new plan you could go back to the store, and not only get a refund, but demand a 50% discount on a non-expired bottle of aspirin. This plan aims to let store owners feel a financial sting for being lazy and not checking expiration dates.

Chris Brennan from the Philadelphia Daily News wrote about it this morning. He says, the bill cleared a council committee yesterday and will be up for full council consideration tomorrow. If council approves it then, then it would be up for a final vote on June 18th.

The spirit of the law is good but the implementation of this could be messy. One big problem, which was raised by Philadelphia’s Health Commissioner Donald Schwartz yesterday, is the potential for people to scam stores by returning old medicines (past their expiration) and falsely claiming they bought it yesterday and they want a new bottle for half price.

Here’s the exact wording describing the instant discount

2) Discount Incentive for Locating Outdated Products.
A person who discovers any outdated product in a food establishment and notifies
an employee of that food establishment shall be entitled to purchase from that food
establishment one of the same product, not-outdated, at a discount of 50% off the
product’s current price, for every outdated product the person discovers.

Download full text of the bill

Again, I like the intent but I wonder if this could really embolden scammers. When I worked at a Walgreen’s, we had a guy who would buy a package of Bic lighters. He would then return a day later with two used lighters in the packaging and claim they didn’t work. He had a receipt so we gave him two new lighters. What do you guys think? Is there a better way to punish stores for selling outdated stuff to us?