Large Scale Fraud by the Supermarket Chains

Another sales tactic used in a few supermarkets is placing a 350g product on the shelf with the 150g size price tag (€2) displayed underneath. Of course the 350g price shows up on your receipt.

I've seen this a few weeks back with the 2kg of flour with the 1kg price underneath.

'If I had a euro for every time that's happened to me, I'd be a rich woman' as they say.

No, you don't have the right to pay as it was advertised. The advertised price (or an advertisement itself) would be an 'invitation to treat' which is basically an invitation to make an offer on the item. If you then decide you want to purchase the item, you take it to the checkout; this would be where you're offering to purchase the goods at the displayed price. The supermarket are then well within their rights to say the price is wrong or the offer is over as a valid contract hasn't been formed.

As for the issue, I generally use the self scanners so can see if an offer isn't applying, and if it doesn't I just remove the item again

You are citing the obligations of a retailer under the regulations there. Nowhere in the regulations is there a remedy or right bestowed on the consumer to purchase the item at the lower price. There are penalties that may be applied where a contravention of the regulations is investigated and found to have occured.

You are more than welcome to quote the legislation that has reversed the well founded principle of invitation to treat.

This is more and more common across all the chains going back at least 5 years.It's either a deliberate policy or just laziness by shelf stockers

Lidl put their prices above the product, everyone else puts the price below the product. It's confused me on more than one occasion.

When I once noticed the shelf price was lower at Aldi to that coming up when scanned, they refused to sell at the lower price and said the scanned price was the correct one.

In general, if an offer doesn't come up I'm expecting and the shop doesn't honour it, I just ask them politely to remove it. My logic is I'd never have bought it otherwise, so I'm not going to waste money on a product at a price I'd never have paid for it.

I'm sure shops sell lots of goods that end up in customers baskets because they thought were at a lower price, but it's up to us as individuals to refuse to buy it if they won't honour it.

It's a long settled principle of common law that's been upheld by the courts many, many times that the display of items in a shop is merely an invitation to treat.

As I said earlier, the regulations create obligations for a retailer and breach may result in penalties but nowhere does it create a right for a consumer to purchase at the lower price as the OP asserted. A retailer may honour the price but there is no obligation to do so.

There are fines for retailers for displaying incorrect pricing an example being if a product on a shelf did not have a label to display a price its 300 euro fine per label.

This is one reasom why electronic labels are becoming more common.

Ive worked in retail for a long time and I feel that since its such a competitive cut throat race to the bottom industry,each retailer is trying to have a large amount of products on offer in 3 week cycles however they are possibly just not checking at store level if prices are accurate for these promotions or the IT and staff systems in place to activate and check promotions are just over worked by the sheer number of promotions each time.

On a day that an offer cycle is activated.Staff should be checking prices aisle by aisle to ensure prices are correct but Im not convinced this is a working practice used by all retail chains.On some occassions IT systems can be a problem.Sometimes after promotions have been set up and dates of activation have been set,"price pushes" have not gone through on time and can take another day or so to push through properly.Possibly promotion needs to be set up a day or 2 earlier to avoid this problem.

The retail chain I worked for the promotions had to be set up in each store not centrally and this was a laborious and time consuming task and deffo this allowed for human errors.also barcodes of products do change without manufacturers alerting retailers and this is deffo another reason why offers may not always reflect correctly.still the retailer needs to check this before activating offers and should be focusing more staff hours on ensuring more price accuracy.Retailers are not been visited enough by government agencies to check pricing issues.

I will conlucde with one statement which some of you may not agree with,the retailer is not deliberately trying to mis lead the consumer,they are all focused on ensuring long term customer loyalty so they would not risk delinerately doing anything to risk losing your custom.They do need to pay more attention to thier promotion and price errors to avoid errors occuring.

100% this. I run an independent family supermarket that has been operating for 70 years. It is not in our, or any of the retail group franchisees to commit ‘large scale fraud’. Customer satisfaction and loyalty comes before everything else. We sell almost 3,000 different lines, more than Tesco express. Barcodes are changing all the time, every time a products ingredient changes, size changes (shrinkflation) DRS bottles etc. Do mistakes happen? Yes. Are some staff more concerned with just getting through the day? Yes. To suggest large scale fraud on behalf of the retailer is laughable though.

The consumer is better off a lot of the time with no special offers or sales prices as the money is just made up by increasing pricing on other products. If the price of everything was the at the "normal" price 365 days a year it would be a lot easier to judge if your overspending or not. "Marked down prices" are the best and most effective tool for retailers because so many people fall for probably the biggest scam ever created.

I suppose many of us have worked in shops in the past.

Its usually an honest mistake that happens very regularly. Oftentimes I'd have the job of changing prices, could be hundreds of labels. The odd thing gets missed, the label gets dropped or lost, or you cant find the item or it's displayed in two or three locations in the shop. I'd always end up with 30 or 40 spare labels of things we don't sell but the system says we do, and a "live" label could be hidden in there.

Sometime a special offer would end on a Saturday or Sunday, but there's usually a different weekend staff working who wouldn't usually update the prices. We would always stand by the lower price to keep customers happy.

It's worth noting the opposite is very true, and no customer has complained the price charged was cheaper than what was displayed. Tesco used to have a "pay the difference" offer in the UK if the shelf price didn't match the sale price, and I remember people were getting PlayStation 3s for £10 due to a pricing error.

Was it worth the 10 yrs of bad breath?