Not yet bound
What does this cost?
ALS-COFFEE-1.2-PRICE-001
The engine can run this kind of check and a public product page can settle it — but THIS standard has not yet written the binding or put the entry through its adversarial pass. The obstacle is unwritten work in this document, not the evidence and not the engine. Each one names the engine capability that fits.
Why this is not yet bound
No engine ReqKind fits as written. `price_under` exists but adjudicates a price against a cap the buyer supplies, and this entry asks only whether a price is published at all; the engine exports no `price_is_stated` kind. No binding and no adversarial pass have been authored for this entry in this standard, so it is not `executable`; the obstacle is unwritten work in this document, not the evidence and not the engine. Because no kind fits, this one needs an engine-gap proposal rather than a binding invented here.
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
Authored expectation: no prediction, confidence low. The numeric band this standard used to carry is not published at this grammar version.
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.
The numeric fail-rate band this reasoning was authored with is NOT carried at grammar 1.2 and is not reproduced here. Authored bands held 1 of 10 against this category's own sample and every miss was HIGH, so a direction derived from the band would inherit the error that condemned it (SCHEMA.md §9.3 step 3). The band survives in ALS-COFFEE v1.1 (standard_hash f8ec2780f60c38931913e5b6cd37506500c8462709209de7180ba6691d6137e7), which is byte-frozen and still served.
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