Background: This story describes how a waitress told a patron a bottle of wine was "thirty seven fifty" and turned out to be $3,750. It's not mentioned but for the sake of the question assume the price is not listed on the menu and we must go by their word.
Question: Does this constitute a verbal agreement and is there specific verbiage the law requires when stating dollar amounts? Like "three thousand seven hundred and fifty dollars" vs "thirty seven fifty"?
It would depend on whether the buyer could reasonably think that the price was $37.50 and not $3,750. If he could, then they didn't have an agreement, they had a misunderstanding, and the seller cannot expect the buyer to pay the amount that the seller had in mind. In this instance, I have a hard time constructing a reasonable scenario where the customer really thought the price was $37.50, but with somewhat different circumstances (Ma and Pa Kettle go to the big city and eat in a restaurant for the first time), it could happen. The party making an offer has to be clear about the offer and cannot use an ambiguous abbreviation of a term to their advantage, knowing that the natural interpretation of the term would induce acceptance where the unnatural interpretation (the un-abbreviated "thirty seven (hundred) fifty dollars") would not.
See What is a contract and what is required for them to be valid?
The parties, having decided they wish to be legally bound, have to agree on what they will be bound to.
Now, "thirty-seven fifty" may mean $37.50 or $3,750 but, just because it has two possible meanings doesn't mean that it is an ambiguous statement. What the waitress said was said in the context of a very, very upscale restaurant and an impartial observer would probably assume the waitress meant the latter value rather than the former.
Consumer protection law would probably not help the patron either. Most such laws make "misleading and deceptive" conduct unlawful but the test is if a reasonable person in the circumstances would be misled or deceived and the answer is: probably not.
Legally, the patron is probably bound to the contract for $3750. Whether enforcing the contract is good business is not a legal question.
To clarify: there is no doubt that a binding contract exists - the restaurant offered a bottle of wine as consideration and required the patron to pay: this offer was accepted. What can be disputed is the amount the patron is bound to pay - the fact that the restaurant believed one thing and the patron another is not sufficient to make the contract void due to lack of genuine consent.
