When you go to the market and buy meat, fish, or produce, it’s always weighed, and city inspectors supposedly — and frequently — check those scales for accuracy.

But what happens when the airline puts your checked-in bag on a scale at the airport?

Who looks at those scales?

Consider this… an inspection of the luggage scales at Newark Airport revealed that more than 27% of them were inaccurate, and 81 were bad enough to be condemned and taken out of service.

One scale was actually off by as much as 35 pounds.

Other bad baggage scales were also discovered at the Charlotte airport. All the more reason to get a small, portable digital scale that you purchase for about $12, weigh your own bags and then take the scale with you to the airport.