Between the summers of 2024 and 2025, the Marin County Department of Agriculture, Weights and Measures, with just 14 employees, visited 399 businesses and conducted 9,921 total inspections on price-accuracy items and commercial devices, including sale items, gas pumps, electric meters and countertop scales. On Wednesday, the department released its findings in a consumer protection report.

The inspections found 151 items that overcharged customers, about 2.0% of the total, and 187 items that undercharged customers, or 2.4%. About 78% of businesses passed their initial inspection, an improvement from previous years. In 2022, just 58% of business measures were compliant with price accuracy.

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Ruth Dusseault is an investigative reporter and multimedia journalist focused on environment and energy. Her position is supported by the California local news fellowship, a statewide initiative spearheaded by UC Berkeley aimed at supporting local news platforms. While a student at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism (c’23), Ruth developed stories about the social and environmental circumstances of contaminated watersheds around the Great Lakes, Mississippi River and Florida’s Lake Okeechobee. Her thesis explored rights of nature laws in small rural communities. She is a former assistant professor and artist in residence at Georgia Tech’s School of Architecture, and uses photography, film and digital storytelling to report on the engineered systems that undergird modern life.