Buyers beware of prices “too good to be true”

A product is advertised at a price that's almost too good to be true. Then the retailer says, "Whoops! That's a mistake." It happens fairly often, especially around the holidays. Unfortunately for Target, someone made a whopper of a mistake on one of the most popular car seats on the market.

Talk to almost any mommy and you'll learn that Britax is the 'king' of car seats, and they don't come cheap. The typical prices range from $200 to $300. So when word spread of an online price of $42.99, hundreds of women snapped them up -- or so they thought. Katie of Sedro-Woolley, WA placed her order and even got an automatic confirmation. It said she'd be charged $46.43, including shipping and handling, and it'd arrive in early January.

But then Katie got a e-mail from Target.com stating they'd cancelled her order and refunded her money because due to an unexpected error, the item was incorrectly priced at the time of her order. The correct price of the car seat is $279.99. "Target is unable to offer the item for the incorrect price," continued the email...

Katie and other moms are fuming, and feel Target should be bound by the advertised price. But unfortunately, that's not how it works; you can read the full article here for more details. I’d be fuming, too, had this happened to me. What do you think? Should retailers be bound to the “advertised price”, even if it was made in error?