Half price : Mon Aug 19, 2013 3:27 pm  

Following the news that Tesco has been fined £300,000 plus costs for misleading advertising on "Half Price"strawberries, fair do's to the prosecutors, but surely everyone knows this particular scam is rife, and nothing is generally ever done about it? We don't use any one supermarket, and do get a good idea of the regular prices of the stuff we buy. On occasions, this is advertised as "half-price", but I'd say that when it is, it is NEVR actuall half of what it would "normally" cost. It seems to be half of some misleading temporarily raised price. Apparently to an extent that's perfectly legal too. The report on the Tesco case says you can sell at "half pice" as long as you don't sell for any longer than you sold at "full price". So, for example, on 2 fairly recent occasions I was in our local C-op and there was a big gondola splash advertising 4 cans of tuna at "half price", at around £4. Now, 4 packs of tuna are up and down, but surely nobody would buy them at £8? This week, you can get 4 X 4 packs for £10 at Farmfoods, for example. That's £3.33 a 4-pack. Using this as an example, should stores be allowed to blatantly manipulate prices for adverts in this way? According to mysupermarket/com, today at Tesco, you can buy a 4 pack of tuna for £4. Or a "Bigger Value 3 pack" for only £5. Judge Michael Chambers said the case was "shocking by its very nature" because consumers had a "high degree of trust" in national chains. Do they? I mean, as a rule? Do you? I don't really trust them at all. Is he from the same planet, or are people largely trusting mugs?

Following the news that Tesco has been fined £300,000 plus costs for misleading advertising on "Half Price"strawberries, fair do's to the prosecutors, but surely everyone knows this particular scam is rife, and nothing is generally ever done about it? We don't use any one supermarket, and do get a good idea of the regular prices of the stuff we buy. On occasions, this is advertised as "half-price", but I'd say that when it is, it is NEVR actuall half of what it would "normally" cost. It seems to be half of some misleading temporarily raised price. Apparently to an extent that's perfectly legal too. The report on the Tesco case says you can sell at "half pice" as long as you don't sell for any longer than you sold at "full price". So, for example, on 2 fairly recent occasions I was in our local C-op and there was a big gondola splash advertising 4 cans of tuna at "half price", at around £4. Now, 4 packs of tuna are up and down, but surely nobody would buy them at £8? This week, you can get 4 X 4 packs for £10 at Farmfoods, for example. That's £3.33 a 4-pack. Using this as an example, should stores be allowed to blatantly manipulate prices for adverts in this way? According to mysupermarket/com, today at Tesco, you can buy a 4 pack of tuna for £4. Or a "Bigger Value 3 pack" for only £5. Judge Michael Chambers said the case was "shocking by its very nature" because consumers had a "high degree of trust" in national chains. Do they? I mean, as a rule? Do you? I don't really trust them at all. Is he from the same planet, or are people largely trusting mugs?

Re: Half price : Mon Aug 19, 2013 5:55 pm  

My local Morrison's were recently offering some packs of cheese at £1.49 each or a "special" offer of 2 for £3

As for the OP, trading standards have calculated that Tesco sold over £40m worth of strawberries during that promotion, leading to a net profit of over £2m. So in the grand scheme, is a £300k fine anything like a suitable or appropriate penalty?

Re: Half price : Tue Aug 20, 2013 7:38 am  

cod'ead wrote:

My local Morrison's were recently offering some packs of cheese at £1.49 each or a "special" offer of 2 for £3...

If that's how they described it, there's probably nothing illegal in it ... after all, it's just a "special" offer for you to pay a bit more.
But it is an example of the sort of thing that's going on all the time, I got so irritated in a supermarket (might have been Sainsbury's, I don't go very often) a few months back that I walked away from their oranges because without weighing different nets and packages of oranges and then calculating the price-per-kilo to compare against the loose oranges, it was not possible to tell which were the cheapest.
Upon reflection, I should have asked an assistant to help me weigh different packages.
Wondering why they have shelf-edge tickets to tell you the price per kilo for most things but not for others, the answer has to be either "a mistake" or to deliberately mislead/confuse.

cod'ead wrote:

...As for the OP, trading standards have calculated that Tesco sold over £40m worth of strawberries during that promotion, leading to a net profit of over £2m. So in the grand scheme, is a £300k fine anything like a suitable or appropriate penalty?

Just a small overhead to the likes of Tesco.

Re: Half price : Tue Aug 20, 2013 8:41 am  

I always thought the likes of MFI, DFS etc must either have a store in the middle of nowhere with everything at full price, or stuff hidden away at the back somewhere in their normal stores, listed at full price. Neither of which would ever see a sale anyway.

Re: Half price : Tue Aug 20, 2013 8:53 am  

Richie wrote:

I always thought the likes of MFI, DFS etc must either have a store in the middle of nowhere with everything at full price, or stuff hidden away at the back somewhere in their normal stores, listed at full price. Neither of which would ever see a sale anyway.

Sofa-store TV adverts seem to have their own reduced vocabulary.
They never use the word "hundred" or "pounds", and every price is preceded by "Now only".
So you get something like "This stylish three-seater, now only four-nine-nine".

Re: Half price : Tue Aug 20, 2013 12:10 pm  

Richie wrote:

I always thought the likes of MFI, DFS etc must either have a store in the middle of nowhere with everything at full price, or stuff hidden away at the back somewhere in their normal stores, listed at full price. Neither of which would ever see a sale anyway.

Nah, MFI used to have a carefully selected range with one or two items in each store that were full price, the items were just rotated around the stores to stay in compliance with the letter of the law.

Pretty much the way the supermarkets handle this stuff is they bump the price of something right up when the demand is very low, say Turkey in January, then they either drop the price around Easter to give the seemingly huge price cut or trim the price by a penny or two each period, over a year that could be as many price reductions as they want to shout about in their ads, nothing technically wrong just dubious.

Re: Half price : Tue Aug 20, 2013 4:26 pm  

El Barbudo wrote: Sofa-store TV adverts seem to have their own reduced vocabulary. They never use the word "hundred" or "pounds", and every price is preceded by "Now only". So you get something like "This stylish three-seater, now only four-nine-nine". ...which brings to mind the one about the hearing aid http://jerrychicken.wordpress.com/2011/11/03/the-hearing-aid/

El Barbudo wrote: Sofa-store TV adverts seem to have their own reduced vocabulary. They never use the word "hundred" or "pounds", and every price is preceded by "Now only". So you get something like "This stylish three-seater, now only four-nine-nine". ...which brings to mind the one about the hearing aid http://jerrychicken.wordpress.com/2011/11/03/the-hearing-aid/

Re: Half price : Wed Aug 21, 2013 4:31 am  

Every time I see one of those ads for half price sofas for 'four ninety nine' I want to go to the shop with a fiver and tell them to keep the change.


Advertisers. I hate them, every last one.

Re: Half price : Wed Aug 21, 2013 7:49 am  

El Barbudo wrote:

... I walked away from their oranges because without weighing different nets and packages of oranges and then calculating the price-per-kilo to compare against the loose oranges, it was not possible to tell which were the cheapest...

It was Sainsbury's.
I am informed that they now have shelf-edge tickets denoting the price per fruit ... which is better but rather unusual.

Re: Half price : Wed Aug 21, 2013 3:11 pm  

El Barbudo wrote:

It was Sainsbury's.
I am informed that they now have shelf-edge tickets denoting the price per fruit ... which is better but rather unusual.

As long as the two can be compared then it doesn't make much difference, don't oranges get sold individually when loose anyway?