Crowcery
A Sobeys receipt is easier to read than most, because it groups items under
department headers and prints product names in ordinary mixed case instead of shouting
abbreviations. The two things that trip people up are the 1C and C
flags, and the fact that Sobeys prints two kinds of discount line that mean opposite things.
1C means tax was charged. C on its own means it was
not. The letter is not the signal here. The digit in front of it is.
You can confirm it at the bottom of your own receipt, because the footer names the table: a
receipt with 1C items prints its tax line as HST 1 14%. That leading
1 is the same 1. The C is just how Sobeys labels the column.
The same layout is used at Safeway and FreshCo, both Empire banners, but Safeway prints different letters. Full letter lookup, chain by chain.
On a Safeway receipt in BC or Saskatchewan, a product line ends in C, and a B in
front of it means both taxes were charged. The two lines printed under a drink carry their
own letters: the +EHC fee is GR (GST only) and the
+Deposit is R (not taxed). The C is the column marker (as
on Sobeys), so BC is not "British Columbia", it is B plus the column letter.
Read a product's flag by what comes before the C:
| Flag | What it means |
|---|---|
C | Not taxed. Groceries, produce, meat. |
BC | GST and PST both charged. Pop, snack cakes, toilet paper. |
GR | GST only, on the +EHC environmental handling
charge printed under a drink. |
R | The bottle +Deposit line. Not taxed. |
A short British Columbia example (identifying details altered): a case of pasta, toilet paper, three jars of sauce. Only the toilet paper carries a B:
$14.90 + $6.99 + $1.66 + $1.66 + $1.66 = $26.87. Both tax lines are on the $6.99 alone: 5% is $0.35 and 7% is $0.49, and $26.87 + $0.35 + $0.49 = $27.71. The YOU SAVED lines are informational, as on Sobeys: the printed price is what you paid.
A Regina receipt shows the other two letters. Two 2L drinks were BC at $3.99
with an +EHC $0.08 GR and a +Deposit $0.25 R under each, and two
boxes of snack cakes were BC at $3.49; one of each pair was reversed by a
FREE ITEM line carrying the same flag. After the reversals the B items came to
$3.99 + $3.49 = $7.48 and the two EHC lines to $0.16. The 5% GST line was $0.38, which is 5%
of B plus G ($7.64), and the 6% PST line was $0.45, which is 6% of the B items
alone ($7.48). The $0.50 of deposits (R) was in neither. So the fee is taxed federally but
not provincially, the deposit not at all, and a free-item reversal takes its tax with it.
How much this rests on. Four Safeway receipts: three from BC and one from Saskatchewan, all reconciling to the cent under the reading above. No Safeway receipt from Alberta or Manitoba yet, and too few FreshCo receipts to say which convention it prints.
Department headers. Sobeys groups your shop and prints a heading each time it changes:
GROCERY, PRODUCE, MEAT, BAKERY and so on. They carry no price and are not items. If you are counting lines to check the item count, these do not count.
This is the one that actually costs people money when they get it wrong, and the two lines look almost identical on the paper.
| Line | What it does |
|---|---|
YOU SAVED $3.00 | Information only. The price on the item line above it is already the price you paid. Nothing is subtracted anywhere. It is telling you what the item would have cost at full price. |
YOUR DISCOUNT -$5.00 | Real money. This is a separate negative line and it is subtracted in the subtotal. The item line above it still shows the undiscounted price. |
So if you add up the item lines and also subtract every YOU SAVED, you will
undercount your own bill. And if you ignore the YOUR DISCOUNT lines, you will
overcount it.
Eight items, both kinds of discount line, and two taxable items:
The subtotal. Add every item line and subtract the two YOUR DISCOUNT lines, while leaving the YOU SAVED lines alone: 3.49 + 3.49 + 3.99 + 2.99 + 16.49 − 5.00 + 15.38 − 5.00 + 5.49 + 6.99 = $48.31. Exactly the printed subtotal.
The tax. Only the two 1C chocolate bars are taxable: 3.49 + 3.49 =
$6.98, and 6.98 × 14% = 0.9772, which prints as $0.98. The other $41.33
of food is basic groceries and contributes nothing.
Why chocolate is taxed and chicken is
not.
The total. 48.31 + 0.98 = $49.29. Everything reconciles.
The loyalty summary. POINTS EARNED lines appear inline against the items that
earned them, and the block at the end totals them up alongside your balance. Points do not
affect the money on the receipt at all, so ignore them when you are checking arithmetic. Your
member card number is masked to the last three digits.
A summary of what the trip saved you, printed between asterisks near the end: Discounts and Specials, Your Total Savings, and a Percentage Savings figure. It is a restatement of savings already reflected above, not an additional deduction. On the example receipt it reads $17.10 and 26%.
Because Sobeys prints them in mixed case and allows a longer name than most. Across our
collection, Sobeys names run up to 30 characters, where Costco stops at 12. You still get
abbreviations (FS ChickBreast B/S is fresh boneless skinless chicken breast) but far
less mangling. Decoding the abbreviations.
How confident are we here? This page comes from 18 Sobeys receipts. Most are from Nova Scotia, with a couple from New Brunswick and one from Ontario, so the layout description is solid but anything rate-related is Atlantic-flavoured. Every figure in the worked example is from one real receipt and reconciles to the cent. Sobeys can change its format at any time and publishes nothing about it. Corrections welcome at support@crowcery.com.
Available in Canada; English-language receipts; not offered in Quebec. Or try the read-only demo first, no signup needed.
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