Co-op meal deal - overcharging

Burnsie1983

Hello

So, I regularly by a meal deal from the co-op 

With a member's card, the meal deal is £3.50 

I noticed a couple of times that I was charged more than £3.50 for the exact same things that I buy at least once a week. The person at the checkout kept telling me that the discount had been applied, but she wasn't able to provide a receipt as they went out of paper. 

The next time I went in I obtained a receipt. 

I also obtained a receipt the next time I was overcharged. 

I sent these to the customer relations team who told me, on more than one of occasion, that the items I selected were not part of the meal deal. They stated that they check and compared what I bought and cross-reference with their website. The website shows a very limited amount of foods in their meal deal. 

However, in the shop there are many shelves which show the main, snack and drink options.

After some trial and error with purchasing, it seems that if you buy anything in addition to the meal deal, the meal deal price is not applied. For example, I paid something like £4.75 for the £3.50 meal deal plus a banana at 27p! This seems very odd as it surely discourages people to make multiple purchases. 

However, they are also appearing to go against their advertised pricing.

Can this be correct??

Browntoa

Yes 

You need to ensure you buy the correct items 

It's not overcharging as you claim but correct pricing 

Mr.Generous

I've seen till glitches on offers like this, say the meal deal can include a snack - but banana is excluded, and you scan sandwich, drink, banana, snack in that order it rejects the deal (wrongly) because of the scan order. The software has already decided you don't qualify because the banana is not included.

Yes I know it shouldn't do that!!

I worked retail for 28 years and didn't believe it myself till I saw it. A new manager (who came to us from Boots) told me the exact order to buy a Boots meal deal with an extra item or two, and the different price depending on the order you scanned was amazing. They had an offer on sun dried crisps or something, and if you scanned in a particular order you got both deals. You could buy a large choc bag as a snack item which had a retail price of nearly the meal deal. We used to share our reciepts back in the staff room at work to see who saved the most. It was more than 50% off I think.

Anyway the point is whoever wrote the software for the till to recognise the deal didn't consider every eventuality. Try scanning the 3 meal deal items together, first or last. Use the self scan checkout and if it doesn't give the deal cancel the extra items and purchase seperately. I know it's a pain but they will have to keep authorising the transaction until they get it right. Unless store staff bring it up with systems department the issue will continue I suspect.

If you involved trading standards I bet it would be resolved in a week.

Burnsie1983

Browntoa said:

Yes 

You need to ensure you buy the correct items 

It's not overcharging as you claim but correct pricing 

So it's the combination. Ie if you buy the correct items, plus additional items, it invalidates the original offer? Seems odd business practice as I just won't buy said additional items and spend less money there