Argos and its CrAzY PrIcEs ;-)

Originally posted by Cabaal
Thats weird cause you thought it very funny at the time to....
sigh
:rolleyes:

Who said it wasnt funny, i am merely stating facts.

having the previous price at 9999 just means that there has never been a price drop since the item was entered into their systems.

the default price on items starts at the maximum the system allows when the item is first entered rather than zero so that if there are any mistakes nobody tries to buy things for 0 euro.

not that it makes a difference anyway with them because i was once in there in the dun laoghaire store looking for a PS2 and they had a stick in advert in all the books on the tables advertising it with an extra (cheap) controller, remote control, memory card and 1 game for E179.99 and they wouldn't honour the price when i took it to the checkout because they said it was a mistake. i did the old 'advertised prices' thing (they are obliged to sell things at the prices they have advertised) and after about 15 minutes of me insisting this they got the manager out and she basically told me to fvck off if i didn't like it because they could withdraw things for sale as and when they want. she gave me some story about it being a mistake from the UK that wasn't noticed, but that there was no way they would let me have it for that price. oh, and while she kept me busy, one of the store grunts went ropund and ripped all the pages from the books and ran off with them.

b@stards.

i even tried contacting the uk customer serives dept. but they politly told me to bugger off too.

Any up-to-date information regarding pricing/specification changes etc. are advised to the till operator via on-screen "Bulletins". The customer is then informed about this information at the till. Argos' policy is that the customer is informed of any errors as early as possible - ideally from catalogue inserts otherwise at the till, at which point the customer can, if they so wish, decline the transaction.

It's gas really. How many customers would walk up to the till and demand they pay the €9999.99? "False advertising" and all!

That €9999.99 price is the default for new products brought into stock (You could imagine the chaos if everything started off @ €0.00 ). As the product above wasn't previously reduced, the system uses the previous price (ie the default €9999.99)

Originally posted by sceptre
The price displayed is an invitation to treat only, not an offer. There's a pile of legal precedent on this from the 1950s onwards.

But the raft of consumer legistation in the 1970s changed that. While it is still an invitation to treat and they don't need to sell, they would be guilty of false advertising.

Originally posted by Victor
But the raft of consumer legistation in the 1970s changed that. While it is still an invitation to treat and they don't need to sell, they would be guilty of false advertising.

If the price is only displayed on the instore catalogues they're not technically advertising at all (as opposed to posters displayed inside or outside the stores). If the price is displayed on the distributed catalogues they're covered by the small print on page 1123 of the current catalogue (again, provided that it's a genuine error and that they don't take the proverbial on a regular or semi-regular basis. If it was a small error they'd be more likely to just swallow the difference). On games consoles in particular the distributed catalogue price is usually out of date (the current one lists a PS2 for 259.99 whereas I'm sure the instore catalogue has it for 60 less).

Actually my referring to it as the "distributed catalogue" is a little inaccurate - they make sure that consumers pick up the catalogues instore and remove them themselves partly for the specific reason that they don't get done for false advertising when they don't distribute the stuff themselves.

The raft of consumer legislation in the late 1970s (including the 1980 Sale of Goods and Supply of services act (replacing the previous 1893 act)) only changed that in the case of actual advertising. A newspapar advert offering a product at a specific cost could result in a vendor being done for false advertising but provided that they don't make numerous "mistakes" the penalties would be pretty much non-existant (and just think of all the power that the ASAI wields). The ODCA could take action but they wouldn't bother in the case of an occasional pricing error displayed only on the instore pricelists of a catalogue store.

Originally posted by Sundy
It wasnt advertising because it was in store and their goods are displayed by graphical representation so it was no different to a incorrect price tag on something in tesco. So in the eyes of the law it was simply a price tag put on an item in error.

But they also deliver brochures to people, which presumably also have incorrect prices. There is also an obligation to display correct prices.

http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?s=&threadid=79725 etc.

I knew they would be within their rights to do what they did, or they wouldn't have done it, it just p1ssed me off that I didn't get my PS2 on the cheap (well I did, just not there. FYI, i paid less for it a year ago than the current argos price:D).

As a brief side note to the whole thing, I read in computer active (the only mag I could find on a Sunday in my local Spa) that a japanese PC co. (along the lines of Komplett or Elara) mistakenly advertised a new PC for 150 euro instead of 1500 on their website, and by the time someone realised andcorrected the mistake emails went right round the country and over 1000 orders had been placed.

funny thing is, although the company wasn't obliged to honour the price, they actually did and shipped out the 1000 odd PC's to the people who had ordered them. the full story (although not much more than I've just said) can be found in this months computer active in the news section.

no, it definately wasn't komplett, i heard aboutthat one a few months ago. this one was much more recent and involved a japanese company and japanese people (in japan ). the whole story is similar, but it's diffenret because they quoted the name of the company, and the prices in Yen.