One organization keeps grocery stores in check. Whether it's the scales at the checkout counter, the price of milk, or the scanners ringing you up, someone from the Missouri Department of Agriculture tries to make sure people get what you pay for.

A few cents more for milk, a few cents more for meat, and even more for fruit and vegetables: some customers leave the checkouts with sticker shock.

“Two hundred-twenty nine dollars and 74 cents -- I have a heart condition and it just made my heart beat a lot faster,” said one customer recently.

When you pay that much for food, you want to be assured you get your money’s worth.

“You don't know what you're getting. You get what it says. Is it true? Who knows?” said another customer.

“I take it on faith,” said another.

But you don't just have to rely on faith.

“Pretty much unannounced; we make an unannounced visit,” said Steve Gill, a manager in the Department of Agriculture’s Division of Weights and Measures.

The Division of Weights and Measures is on the road daily, conducting six inspections in grocery stores. Inspectors check scales, price scanners, country of origin, egg inspections, milk inspections, and weight of prepackaged things like ground beef and steak.

“We want to make sure the consumer is receiving what he pays for,” said Gill.

KY3 News requested inspection reports for all of the stores in Greene, Christian and Taney counties for last year. We received a box filled with reports – and went through each one, line by line.

We found the Dillons store on Kearney Avenue was ordered to reweigh and re-price its entire meat case after inspectors found 12 different packages of meat under weight.

Roberts Supermarket in Ash Grove also had to reweigh its entire meat case after finding 12 packages mis-weighed -- some higher, some lower. Since the inspection in August, the owner says they’ve made changes.

“For one, we got a new meat manager, so any problems we have get addressed pretty quickly. The other thing is we check the scales on a regular basis,”

Since then, Roberts says it hasn’t had any other citations or customer complaints.

Inspectors also ordered the Food for Less on Battlefield Road in Springfield to reweigh and re-price, as well as the Price Cutter Plus stores on Battlefield and on Commercial Street.

“We work quickly to fix problems when we are made aware of them,” said a Price Cutter manager in a telephone interview.

In the case of both of these stores, the problem was corrected before the inspector left the store.

“We find problems occasionally but a lot of times, if we work with the business and get them corrected, a lot of times they don't know they have a problem,”

What we found in the inspection reports seems to prove that.

For instance, the Wal-Mart store on South Campbell Avenue in Springfield had eight scales fail inspection. They were corrected before the inspector left the store.

At Smillie’s IGA on Glenstone Avenue, inspectors caught one scanner ringing up Vanish toilet cleaner 14 cents cheaper than it was. Finding that problem helped owner Bill Smillie.

“This past month they found an item in our meat department that was under-priced, so it helps us make sure we're charging the right price for ourselves and our customers,” said Smillie.

Smillie is glad he has someone double checking his work.

“Customers should rest assured, whether it's a gallon of gasoline at a service station or a dozen of eggs in Smillie’s market, they're getting a fair measure of product for their money,”

If someone has a complaint about a grocery store, he or she can call the Department of Agriculture at (573) 751-4211.