TESCOS recently their fruit-and-veg pledge on TV and in the press. To drop the price of different fruit and vegetables every week to help us eat the PC five-a-day.
BING! Every little helps...
HOWEVER, I discovered in The Times ('Tesco 'misled shoppers' with half-price offers on fruit and vegetables') there is a loophole in the market trading standards that they've exploited in order to make out they cut their prices, when really they raised the price steeply before dropping it for the promotion.
Now, we know that supermarkets fix prices regularly, because when you do the weekly shop, and buy, say, pre-packaged dessert, like apple pie from Asda for ONLY 99p, and word gets round how delicious that pie is, you know that a few weeks later, that same apple pie will cost double in a few weeks!
Well, the Department of Trade and Industry has a "28 day rule" on how long something can be priced before the price is marked down.
The Times'article says:
FOOLED! We're all fooled by these big, glittery promotions!"Tesco confirmed that apples, peaches, nectarines and plums had all risen in price in December before being reduced in the first week of the promotion. A spokeswoman said that the fluctuations had been due to seasonal variations, such as rises in transport costs around Christmas. “Any suggestion that we ramp up prices in order to cut them again is the purest nonsense,” she said.
As perishable goods, fruit and vegetables are exempt from the “28day rule” in the Department of Trade and Industry’s pricing code of practice, which states that shops can advertise a discount on a product only if it has been priced at the higher rate for the past 28 days. Mr Fisher said that supermarkets used the loophole regularly. He added: “We [consumers] are suckers. We like a price with a big discount and if it’s cut, we believe it’s cheap. We don’t shop the way we’re supposed to, by checking prices thoroughly.”"
The Times in print edition printed a table of comparisons of original prices, compared to raised prices before the fruit-and-veg-pledge offer, with the price now and calculated the difference between the original and present price to be no less than 20%.
Although The Times did not publish those statistics, The Guardian did! ('Tesco accused of cheating over half-price offer')
"Gala apples rose in price from £1.19 a kg in the week beginning December 11 to £1.99 in the week of December 18. They were then slashed to 99p in the first week of this year. Plums were £1.48 for 500g on December 11, but went up to £2.99 in the week of December 28, before being cut to £1.48 again in the first week of the pledge. Nectarines similarly rose from £1.49 to £2.99 before being cut to £1.48, while peaches rose from £1.99 to £2.99 before the price was halved."
1 comment:
All that those articles described was a well known loophole in the system. We all know that Tescos cant keep cutting all their prices anyway otherwise everything will be a penny after a few years.
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