Asda Price Errors
henrik1971
Forumite 202 Posts
Hi there - I'm new to these boards and normally post on the pure money boards, so apologies if this is old news:
I do a 'main' grocery shop at Asda each week, and most weeks buy similar things. Probably half of my shop will be same items that I bought the week before, and the other half is very similar stuff, but with some variability in the brands and sizes of items that I might buy.
However, my point in all this is the frequency of price errors that I notice (shelf edge label versus the scanned price). Almost every second or third week I will find an error, go and queue up at the customer service desk and get it checked and the overpayment refunded. Asda also give me a £2 giftcard each time. There's never been an explanation why, but I assume it is a gesture of apology.
I now have quite a lot of these gift cards, and I wondered who else knows about this? Do other stores do the same thing? Have other people on these boards collected a lot of these gift cards?
I was thinking of complaining to Asda head office, as whilst the £2 cards are all well and good, I would much prefer to have confidence that these errors could be far less frequent, and the onus wouldn't be on me to memorise the SEL prices of like 60-70 items when checking through the receipts!
I do a 'main' grocery shop at Asda each week, and most weeks buy similar things. Probably half of my shop will be same items that I bought the week before, and the other half is very similar stuff, but with some variability in the brands and sizes of items that I might buy.
However, my point in all this is the frequency of price errors that I notice (shelf edge label versus the scanned price). Almost every second or third week I will find an error, go and queue up at the customer service desk and get it checked and the overpayment refunded. Asda also give me a £2 giftcard each time. There's never been an explanation why, but I assume it is a gesture of apology.
I now have quite a lot of these gift cards, and I wondered who else knows about this? Do other stores do the same thing? Have other people on these boards collected a lot of these gift cards?
I was thinking of complaining to Asda head office, as whilst the £2 cards are all well and good, I would much prefer to have confidence that these errors could be far less frequent, and the onus wouldn't be on me to memorise the SEL prices of like 60-70 items when checking through the receipts!
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You can complain, but it won't change anything.
There is always a delay between the price changing at the till and the sel changing.
Someone at HO enters a new price for an item and the price changes at every till instantly. They then have to send the new label to each store to be printed and let the person who changes the labels know there are new labels to change. If that person is not sitting at their computer when the email arrives there is a further delay.
You will always get customers who pick up an item after HO have changed the price at the till, but before the person who changes the labels has had a chance to do it.
On top of that you will always get errors, labels not printing so not getting changed, items being in two locations but only one label being printed etc.
Something else I see a lot in asda is multi buy offers that don't add up.
I've a few pictures of Asdas inability to do maths on multi buys.
Such as an item that was £2 each or two for £5!
My neighbour works for asda and does the changes, she works during the day, never evenings or nights.
Not in my store, or the asda my neighbour works in. We have talked about it several times and the price changes can come in at any time of the day.
The offer didn't come off. They gave me £2 gift card and the difference which was 30-40p.
I know it isn't MSE to buy drinking chocolate sachets but with the jars of powder I tend to eat the powder raw.
I don't remember everything, but I have a feeling about certain items, and I tend to remember those. TBH, I do probably know most of the prices. I have one of those brains that remembers useless stuff, like every phone number we've ever had, etc.etc.
Just about the price changes: I used to work at Safeway about 20 years ago in 'price indications'. In those days, the SELs would be printed off on a Saturday -hundreds, sometimes thousands of them. They would be torn and sorted into aisles/categories. Then, once the store closed on Sunday at 4pm, a team of people went round doing all the label changes. It used to take anything from 2-3 hours to all night depending on the number of changes that week. The new prices went live on the tills when the store opened at 8am on Monday. Doing it the other way around would be disasterous! There were the occasional odd mid week changes, but literally a few at most.
The regime for test scanning and checking and rechecking was almost military. If you didn't do it, there was a huge fuss and the company took a very dim view.
Not sure if it's true, but they used to say that Trading Standards would fine the company something like £3000 per item if they did a spot check and found price errors.