what we know

rachelhen

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2069932/Four-largest-supermarkets-face-prosecution-misleading-shoppers-grocery-price-war-lies.html

giraffe69

You only have to go to a supermarket to see what tricks they will play. Let's have competing products but measure them in different ways in order to confuse any comparison, for example. This one is so much per 100 grams but this one is so much per kilo. It is not impossible to do the comparison but one has to wonder at the motivation to force people to do it.

I noticed that Tesco's are selling refills of Gold Blend which are billed as environmentally friendly as they are a paper refill not a glass bottle however the paper pack is substantially more expensive than the glass bottle. That makes a lot of sense!

If you change the size of packs and tins regularly and make sure they are a few grams different from competitors then that will also cause confusion. No end of cunning tricks which, of course, does much for their reputation.

peachyprice

Do people still blindly buy 'special offers' without checking they are getting the best value? I know I don't. There's nothing new in that article, or the one on BBC that any savvy shopper would see straight through.

One thing I NEVER do is pick up offers on the ends of aisles, if you go to the main display you'll often find a better offer on a similar product and it gives you the full picter of weight to price ration of different sizes.

sarahg1969

peachyprice wrote: »

Do people still blindly buy 'special offers' without checking they are getting the best value? I know I don't. There's nothing new in that article, or the one on BBC that any savvy shopper would see straight through.

One thing I NEVER do is pick up offers on the ends of aisles, if you go to the main display you'll often find a better offer on a similar product and it gives you the full picter of weight to price ration of different sizes.

I agree. I never trust the "big pack better value" stickers. They rarely are better value.

Dave_C_2

Ignoring the Daily Mail "make it up as we go along" reportage, this is why supermarkets have been forced to use unit pricing on shelf-edge labels. This saves awful calculations like 240 grams at £1.27 or 325 grams at £1.99

As others have already said, old news

I do note the tactic of covering the unit price labels with special offer labels in my local supermarket. Me being a helpful sort of chap, I slide the special offer labels along to one side so that everyone can read the unit price labels.

Dave

arcon5

I had to buy a torch from ASDA a few weeks ago and needed some AAA batteries, after walking around the electrical area the only batteries they had was a fiver!!! So nearly bought them out of desperation until I saw the cheaper asda value ones at the end of the isles!!!

The best i've seen is a special offer basket with a load of sale items in it.

reduced to 97p was 97p

People was going crazy for them!

Personally though I couldn't give a stuff about their tactics, I tend to work out the better value item myself. At the end of the day their looking to make a profit from you -- it's their job, your job is to stop them and save money (heard that in one of Martins speaches a while ago).


This is why they don't want jouralists writing prices down I guess -- as discussed in a previous thread on here about somebody told to stop writing the prices down. Even ifthe prices was genuine errors, their quick to scream misleading consumers accusations.

WhiteHorse

Given that this is very old news, why have the BBC and the Mail suddenly chosen to have a pop at the supermarkets? This has the smell of government about it.

Azari

WhiteHorse wrote: »

Given that this is very old news, why have the BBC and the Mail suddenly chosen to have a pop at the supermarkets? This has the smell of government about it.

It's because Panorama are doing a piece about it tonight.

Since when have the government cared about people being ripped off?

pmduk

WhiteHorse wrote: »

Given that this is very old news, why have the BBC and the Mail suddenly chosen to have a pop at the supermarkets? This has the smell of government about it.

Government want nothing to do with criticising or controlling supermarkets at either national or local level.