Not discriminating

What does this cost?

ALS-COFFEE-1.0-PRICE-001

This question is executable, but nearly every page answers it the same way — so the answer carries almost no information, and it is published rather than run.

Assertion

price_readable less_than true

Applicability

applies when
any purchasable coffee product
signal
a readable offer price exists

Accepted evidence

  • variant_price — a readable variant price, which the platform exposes on essentially every product

Explicitly insufficient evidence

What does not count, and why. Published because the omission is where a check quietly becomes a claim.

  • a price with no net weight beside it
    An eighteen-dollar bag could be ten ounces or twelve, a twenty per cent difference invisible to any comparison, so a bare price does not answer what the coffee costs.
  • a strikethrough or reference price
    A price the seller never charged is a comparison device rather than the cost of this purchase, and price-indication rules target exactly that.
  • a headline price that is the subscription rate
    Where a recurring option is preselected and cheaper, the most prominent number on the page is a recurring commitment rather than the one-off cost.

Conflict rules

  • When several variants carry different prices — then the engine reads the lowest readable price across variants, which is not the price of any particular offer

Discrimination

Predicted fail rate: 0-5% (predicted, not yet measured)

The engine has measured a price requirement failing for zero of thirteen stores, because a price is exposed on essentially every platform product. A row that passes for everyone carries exactly as little information as one that fails for everyone, so this question is published and deliberately not run. It is the canonical zero-information assertion and the reason this tier exists.

For a shopper

The price is always the easiest thing to find on a coffee page and almost never the thing that is missing. What is frequently missing is the weight beside it, which is what makes the price mean something, and that is asked separately.

For a merchant

Nothing to remediate: the platform exposes a price on every product. The useful work is stating the net quantity for each purchasable size so the price can be compared.

Grounding

  • EU Directive 98/6/EC on the indication of prices (legal_instrument)
    that the selling price and, for products sold by mass, the unit price must both be indicated to consumers, which is why the interesting assertion in this class is the unit price rather than the price
  • Internal measurement recorded in src/server/productTest.ts (internal_measurement)
    that a price requirement failed for zero of thirteen real stores in the engine's own sample and was documented as carrying the same amount of information as one that failed for all thirteen, namely none