New regulations to oblige retailers to display prices clearly and unambiguously

Victor

Mary, all is forgiven. Tesco here I come.

European Communities (Requirements to Indicate Product Prices) Regulations 2002 (S.I 639 of 2002) http://www.entemp.ie/tcmr/639of2002.htm

These Regulations shall come into operation on the 1st day of March 2003.

FAQ http://www.entemp.ie/tcmr/unitpricing_faq.htm

Press Release http://www.entemp.ie/press03/230103.htm

sceptre

Prepare for a major scurry of price-printing in Dixons then. Yay!

Victor

Retailers warned to display price details
From:ireland.com
Friday, 28th February, 2003

The Director of Consumer Affairs has warned retailers that a 20-strong team of inspectors from her office would be implementing a new law obliging retailers to display the prices of all products on sale to consumers or face fines of up to €3,000.

The law, which comes into force tomorrow [Saturday 1 March 2003], will also oblige retailers to display a unit price for all goods sold by quantity or weight.

"The new regulations mean that all goods sold by quantity must be unit priced by reference to the metric units of a kilogram and a litre so that consumers will be able to readily measure value for money when trying to decide between, for instance, a 400gm pack and a 550gm pack," Ms Carmel Foley said at Waterford Institute of Technology yesterday.

"In that situation, the equivalent price per kilo will have to be shown for both packs. Retailers will face penalty fines of up to €3,000 per offence for failure to display prices clearly in line with these new regulations."

Urging consumers to shop around and examine unit prices, Ms Foley added: "Businesses have had time to adapt their pricing systems to the new rules and from Saturday there will be no excuse for failing to comply. As ever, consumers should be vigilant and where they see price details not being displayed they should report this to my office.

"An inspectorate of 20 officers from the ODCA [Office of the Director of Consumer Affairs] will prioritise enforcement of this legislation from this weekend onwards and where there are breaches of the legislation we will not hesitate to prosecute.

"A fundamental part of consumer protection is the provision of information and, in particular, price information. Individual consumers can achieve a great deal by shopping around but we live in a relatively cash-rich and time-poor society. However, the telephone and Internet can also be useful when making price comparisons."

Ms Foley was critical of exclusive deals between colleges and banks and warned students against sticking with a bank for life, irrespective of their service and charges. "I notice here that as with other third-level colleges one particular bank \ has the right to be on campus. Why do you think they paid so much money to get on campus? Because of course they think they have you for life, once they get you as a young student.

"We are much more active going from restaurant to restaurant and shoe shop to shoe shop, but we have this dreadful paralysis and reluctance to move from financial institution to financial institution. In Ireland, we pay over the odds, particularly in our credit card interest rates."

commuterised

Originally posted by Victor
These Regulations shall come into operation on the 1st day of March 2003.

but it's april 15th and I haven't really noticed any difference, just went out to get my lunch , and 1 item out of the 4 was visibly priced...

Gordon

Who do I contact to dob in the people that are breaking the law. I'm sick and tired of being charged an arm and a leg for a leg of chicken...

Anyone got an email address for this?

dmeehan

Office of the Director of Consumer Affairs

here's the bones of their Contact Us page:

There are a number of ways you can contact the Office

Write to:
Office of the Director of Consumer Affairs,
4 Harcourt Road, Dublin 2
Or
Office of the Director of Consumer Affairs,
89-90 South Mall, Cork

Enquiry Line:
402 5555 (01 area), 1890 220 229 (outside 01 area)

Fax Number:
01 4025501

Email:
odca@entemp.ie

Victor

Originally posted by commuterised

but it's april 15th and I haven't really noticed any difference, just went out to get my lunch , and 1 item out of the 4 was visibly priced...

Just mention the €3,000 fine and their attitude changes quickly.

dmeehan

I was in C*******'s in Killarney at the weekend and I have to say it is one of my favourite pubs in killarney.

but..

I was buying this round: 1 pint Heineken & 1 bottle Coors Light.
Their price list stated that it was €3.60 each.

But I was charged €7.00 (no complaints:D ), €7.50 and finally I just handed over a ton of change, exactly €7.20

What a joke - if they are displaying prices they could at least charge the correct amount, and failing that at least maintain some consistency in their (incorrect) prices

Sar!

How is it then that a certain pub in Howth in Dublin this week was taken to court for repeatedly not displaying their prices and lo and behold getting an almightly gigantic fine of €300!!!!!!!!!!!! Whats that a couple of hours tips maybe!!!!??? Its flippin ridiculous - so by the time we actually report these individuals its all for nothing cos it aint gonna stop them if at the end of the day there is no real penalty!!!!!!!!Is it???? And all the energy its taken to pursue that pub in particular has actually cost the flippin taxpayer MORE
money!!!!!!

MadsL

I've almost given up trying to convince Tesco that they should actually do this.

1. I spotted that their beer by the case was not priced. Told a staff member. Said they would deal with it.

2. Next day went in, not priced. Told a staff member. Said they would deal with it.

3. Two days later still not done, spoke to the Asst Manager, said he would deal with it. I pointed out that it should be priced per unit too or they risked a 3000 euro fine. He said he would deal with it. I also pointed out that his tomatoes, toilet paper and dish washer tablets also had no unit pricing and that the tomatoes were confusingly (misleadingly) priced. He told me they were sorting it out with the Office of the Director of Consumer Affairs.


4. Was back about three days later. The beer was priced, but not per litre. Nothing else sorted out. Rang tesco head office and the Office of the Director of Consumer Affairs, Tesco said they would look at it and the Trading standards officer said he would investigate and report back to me.

5. Back into Tescos a few days later. I start to see more violations (almost all the pre-package 'finest' fruit/vegetables has no unit pricing - tomatoes are twice the price pre-packed!!) I speak to the manager again - he says that Trading Standards have given them the all clear.

6. Tesco head office send me an email that states that all their shelf edge labelling complies with the law.

7. I have still had no response from trading standards.


In the meantime it seems that Tesco (and I have now checked several stores) have decided that they are above the law when it comes to certain pre-packed vegetables and fruit. Why is that Tesco?...is it perhaps that your profit margin is MASSIVE on pre-packaged class 1 goods?? Is it because you charge twice the loose price for some items? Is it a coincidence that every store I have checked has the same 'mistakes' in price labeling or blatant policy.

This is the largest retailer in Ireland. Trading Standards should be all over them.

Oh and yeah 200 posts!

shoegirl

There are two problems here - the first that some retailers are just to lazy to price everything and the second that problems with technical systems may put prices incorrectly on tickets.

For the record, the most popular POS systems have two different parts - a point of sales front end til system and secondly a back office stock management system. The price tickets are usually printed off the stock management system rather than the POS system. So if the communications have a problem it may result in incorrect pricing.

Legally, if a retailer is obliged to honour the ticket price if there is a conflict but you may need to fight your corner on this, there can be a lot of ignorance (sometumes deliberate) by retailers.

If I ever have a problem with a retailer, on any level, I leave the shop immediately and don't shop there again.

seamus

Originally posted by shoegirl
For the record, the most popular POS systems have two different parts - a point of sales front end til system and secondly a back office stock management system. The price tickets are usually printed off the stock management system rather than the POS system. So if the communications have a problem it may result in incorrect pricing.

Any of the major retailers have an integrated system, which work one of two ways - 1. When a price change takes place, that change is transmitted to every till. Any till not connected will have a big dirty "Not connected!" sign flashing, and will update itself when it gets connected.
2. The second way (and the way used by most older systems) is that the price DB is queried by the tills on each and every product scan. If a till becomes disconnected, it fails to work.

Obviously, the first one suffers if a till becomes disconnected for any significant period of time (> 2 hours), and the second suffers if the DB goes down (all tills go down). A compromise would be to query the DB on every scan, but also have a backup DB on the tills just in case.

But that's off-topic. The main cause of incorrect labelling is laziness. Only once could we ever blame a pricing mistake on the computer, and that was a bug in the software

shoegirl

Actually, seamus, you're not quite right there.

If the retailer is using ICL teampos (old, but many big retailers still use it), the prices update on a nightly basis or if manually applied. Which can result in two things - either a network issue can cause irregularities or else a failure on the overnight.

TRouble is also is that teampos isn't very 24 hr friendly. You are right that if a till is off it will not work at all. Teampos as I used to support it did not have an integrated stocktaking system - this was fed in by another unix based system which was then connected into AS400 financial system. As the prices for ticketing came from the unix system it is easy for prices to fail. This needs to be checked by a controller every day.

However, if the retailer is using "Swift" (a different and more up to date system) the tills can actually work independently in the case of a network failure, so the possibility of a price change is higher. However there is a limitation on data storage for precisely this reason. But Swift is designed to work in the event of a catastriphic network failure.

Such is my experience of support pos systems for one of the largest UK retailers (not Tesco, sorry!)

I've no idea how some of NCR or other companies systems handle these failures.

Victor

I was told by a manager that Tesco Ireland operate realtime off a single database in head office (presumably with local backup). It means any errors can be corrected centrally, but if something is wrong, it is wrong everywhere.

shoegirl

Victor - you are probably right about Tesco, but most POS systems now have built in resilience, which means that they will still continue to operate in the case of a network failure. I have yet to see a Tesco store close in ireland so I assume they have a resilient system. He is right but if the network fails or a local link is faulty (and it might sound surprising but one of our test when on operations duty for a tesco competitor was to print off sales sheets from different servers and compare for discrepancies) it can result in incorrect pricing.

Also if an EAN is not priced correctly on the system manual pricing has to be used. It used to be the case that if the network failed or a segment failed some (usually every second!) terminal went down. Now they are designed to go on operating. And so they will NOT receive price updates!

seamus

Originally posted by Victor
I was told by a manager that Tesco Ireland operate realtime off a single database in head office (presumably with local backup). It means any errors can be corrected centrally, but if something is wrong, it is wrong everywhere.

Depends on the shop then I suppose. Where I was, a central DB was held in the support centre. Every evening around 12am, and then again at 12pm, any price changes were communicated to each shops' DB. The tills worked then off the second system I described. The tills never queried the support centre DB, and each shops' DB could differ slightly, but only as regards what is in the DB, prices were always the same across the shops (except for the counters - Meat, Pizza, etc).

Victor

There is also the EAN Code of Conduct

http://www.ean.ie/

pork99

That law has been in force for almost 2 years now and yet Tescos in Stillorgan is breaking it everyday. Their price displays are a total mess. If they were fined €3,000 for every time they have breached it they should be bankrupt by now

(Though it's probably no worse than most other places)

TabulaRasa22

Sar! wrote:

How is it then that a certain pub in Howth in Dublin this week was taken to court for repeatedly not displaying their prices and lo and behold getting an almightly gigantic fine of €300!!!!!!!!!!!! Whats that a couple of hours tips maybe!!!!??? Its flippin ridiculous - so by the time we actually report these individuals its all for nothing cos it aint gonna stop them if at the end of the day there is no real penalty!!!!!!!!Is it???? And all the energy its taken to pursue that pub in particular has actually cost the flippin taxpayer MORE
money!!!!!!

Sad state of affairs. Its like that pub in Galway that defied the no smoking ban. Acting the maggot.

audizerstoren

you should try Dixons/Curry's they never have prices displayed untill you mention complaint/regulator ...result:: frantic activity!!!

vesp

Wish the authorities would target some "professionals" next, like dentists, accountants and solicitors. This is where the real rip-offs are.

Heisenberg.

This post has been deleted.

Victor

The Scientist wrote: »

I think this topic is outdated & probably not much use anymore.
Unstickied... or is it unstuck?

NOOOOOOOOOoooooooooooooooooo.................. I still come back and look at it sometimes.

How about moving it to consumer issues and ask it they wan't to include it somewhere?

Heisenberg.

This post has been deleted.