Following the news that Tesco has been fined £300,000 plus costs for [url=http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-birmingham-23755528misleading advertising on "Half Price"[/urlstrawberries, fair do's to the prosecutors, but surely everyone knows this particular scam is rife, and nothing is generally ever done about it?

We don't use any one supermarket, and do get a good idea of the regular prices of the stuff we buy. On occasions, this is advertised as "half-price", but I'd say that when it is, it is NEVR actuall half of what it would "normally" cost. It seems to be half of some misleading temporarily raised price.

Apparently to an extent that's perfectly legal too. The report on the Tesco case says you can sell at "half pice" as long as you don't sell for any longer than you sold at "full price".

So, for example, on 2 fairly recent occasions I was in our local C-op and there was a big gondola splash advertising 4 cans of tuna at "half price", at around £4. Now, 4 packs of tuna are up and down, but surely nobody would buy them at £8? This week, you can get 4 X 4 packs for £10 at Farmfoods, for example. That's £3.33 a 4-pack.

Using this as an example, should stores be allowed to blatantly manipulate prices for adverts in this way? According to mysupermarket/com, today at Tesco, you can buy a 4 pack of tuna for £4. Or a "Bigger Value 3 pack" for only £5.

Judge Michael Chambers said the case was "shocking by its very nature" because consumers had a "high degree of trust" in national chains. Do they? I mean, as a rule? Do you? I don't really trust them at all. Is he from the same planet, or are people largely trusting mugs?

My local Morrison's were recently offering some packs of cheese at £1.49 each or a "special" offer of 2 for £3

As for the OP, trading standards have calculated that Tesco sold over £40m worth of strawberries during that promotion, leading to a net profit of over £2m. So in the grand scheme, is a £300k fine anything like a suitable or appropriate penalty?

If that's how they described it, there's probably nothing illegal in it ... after all, it's just a "special" offer for you to pay a bit more.
But it is an example of the sort of thing that's going on all the time, I got so irritated in a supermarket (might have been Sainsbury's, I don't go very often) a few months back that I walked away from their oranges because without weighing different nets and packages of oranges and then calculating the price-per-kilo to compare against the loose oranges, it was not possible to tell which were the cheapest.
Upon reflection, I should have asked an assistant to help me weigh different packages.
Wondering why they have shelf-edge tickets to tell you the price per kilo for most things but not for others, the answer has to be either "a mistake" or to deliberately mislead/confuse.


Just a small overhead to the likes of Tesco.

I always thought the likes of MFI, DFS etc must either have a store in the middle of nowhere with everything at full price, or stuff hidden away at the back somewhere in their normal stores, listed at full price. Neither of which would ever see a sale anyway.

Sofa-store TV adverts seem to have their own reduced vocabulary.
They never use the word "hundred" or "pounds", and every price is preceded by "Now only".
So you get something like "This stylish three-seater, now only four-nine-nine".

Nah, MFI used to have a carefully selected range with one or two items in each store that were full price, the items were just rotated around the stores to stay in compliance with the letter of the law.

Pretty much the way the supermarkets handle this stuff is they bump the price of something right up when the demand is very low, say Turkey in January, then they either drop the price around Easter to give the seemingly huge price cut or trim the price by a penny or two each period, over a year that could be as many price reductions as they want to shout about in their ads, nothing technically wrong just dubious.

...which brings to mind the one about the hearing aid [urlhttp://jerrychicken.wordpress.com/2011/11/03/the-hearing-aid/[/url

Every time I see one of those ads for half price sofas for 'four ninety nine' I want to go to the shop with a fiver and tell them to keep the change.


Advertisers. I hate them, every last one.

It was Sainsbury's.
I am informed that they now have shelf-edge tickets denoting the [uprice per fruit[/u ... which is better but rather unusual.

As long as the two can be compared then it doesn't make much difference, don't oranges get sold individually when loose anyway?

It's better than not being able to compare, which was the case earlier.
But fruit grow to different sizes ... only supermarkets demand that they are the same size.


Yes, but they charge by weight at the checkout.
Charging by weight has been considered fair since time immemorial.

Ah, there be a problem then.

We've always bought large oranges, lemons and limes as single items, selling by weight just doesn't seem right.

Well, there's large and there's slightly larger, even as single items, so selling by weight overcomes that issue.
Of course, supermarkets demand unrealistic uniformity of size/shape/colour etc which does lend itself to unit pricing but that's a sort of circular justification.

When I buy pork chops, the butcher slaps them on a bit of paper to show me them, I say yes that's the size and quality I want, then he weighs them and tells me the price, I say say yes and we conclude the transaction.

In one of the local greengrocers' here, they sell their apples loose and they vary greatly in size (and shape and colour) ... so, sensibly, they sell 'em by weight.
They go a bit further ... and TBH I'm only 50-50 on this one ... their eating apples, of whatever variety, are all priced the same per kilo so they don't need to put plastic varietal-name stickers on them, you choose them from the box and they just weigh them.

Yes but you live in a well known Socialist enclave hippy community with your sandals and beards, picture houses and incantations & spell shops, you can't expect all of us to live that way, we need bags of apples with one price, "Apples, £1" that sort of thing, it doesn't matter what sort of f**kin apples they are as long as they don't have worms in them and growing them in plastic bags prevents all that sort of hassle.

Aye, but suburbs like yours are ripe territory for change for the better.
BTW, I was over your way (well Ilkley, that's near isn't it?

) ... a throbbing foodie enclave with proper butchers and all the rest of it.
What with them and the self-styled poshies of Harrogate encroaching on you from the North and Chapel Allerton/Chapeltown from the South, you'll be surrounded by real food, it'll be like the Dad's Army map soon ... "Don't panic, Mr Mainwaring, we can still get plastic apples from Sainsbury's".

BTW, it's not so much a socialist enclave round here, it's more of a "if they leave us alone we'll just ignore them" sort of place.
Our MP is a Tory, one of the modern-chancer--spiv-market-forces-spouter breed ... I can't imagine he got many votes in this part of his constituency.
Mind you, crystal healing services and hopi ear-candle selling are already privatised, so he might have some support there.

To illustrate how convoluted things are - and presumably therefore why supermarkets get away with it so much - I just looked purely at random at current Tesco half price offers and the one I picked was 350g Cathedral City cheese, "was £4.50 now £2.25".

A quick search at mysupermarket finds that the same product is indeed £4.50 at Waitrose.
At Sainsbury's it is the same price but you can get 2 for £6
And at Asda the price (not reduced) is £2

And so, you can argue that yes in a way it is half price, and yet clearly you aren't, to me, saving yourself £2.25, not really, and indeed the half price is seemingly more than the Asda full price. So everybody's right.

I work for Debenhams, and we have a fair amount of products that are always marked as 50% off, these things get rolled onto the shop floor during a sale, making the customers think that they really ARE 50% off, even though they're NEVER on sale for the 'full' price.

Downright fibs really, to be honest

Well, someone must be reading this thread ... www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-23797882

Well, someone must be reading this thread ... www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-23797882

Never understand how furniture places even bother advertising things on offer when we all know that this piece of crap suite has never been £1400 and the "special offer price of £400" is just what it costs, never even look at the special offer marks on anything, a quick google search will find you the same item cheaper online and not in a sale.

I have it on good authority that Next actually produce clothing especially for their 'sale' so the garments with '50% off' have always been designed to be cheap and nasty and sold at the sale price.

I thought that they were the higher price for x amount of months (which no-one would ever dream of buying at that price) and then just get rotated around the store and put at the back when at full price then when it was that particular line's time to "come on sale" ie the correct price for the product, they marketed it like hell and had them at the front of the store, on TV, in the press, then mark it back up and its another line's time to "go on sale" Sure I read that on something like Money Saving Expert, and thats how they get away with it.

Supermarkets do it with cheap wine, labelled up to look expensive and mark it up at £9.99 for half the year, then the other half it's "half price" £4.99.

Quite often, the wine has reached the point where age-related improvement is at or beyond its peak and the wine can only deteriorate from then on.
When it was £9.99 it was coming up to or at peak-drinkability but, as that point is passed, the wine's storability is decreasing.
The same bottle of wine may have been £9.99 and reducing it to £4.99 does represent a substantial price-drop but whether it's a fair comparison is debatable.
From my point of view, if I bought wine at such a reduction, I'd drink it soon rather than store it.

Another situation I came across (not in a supermarket but in a "specialist" shop) was a wine with a large "review" card attached to the shelf where some wine expert had written in [iDecanter[/i magazine (or similar) a recommendation for that wine but not for the same year of the wine that was on the shelf.
e.g. Let's say the review was for the 2006 wine but the wine on the shelf was 2007.
As chance would have it, they had a woman wandering that section and, noticing me browsing, she asked if she could help me.
I pointed out the different years and she either could not or would not grasp why it could be a problem.