My wife and i went out today to go shopping for some furniture for our new house. We went to a place we had been to before (just browsing then) - but now we went because of an advertised sale and we had now saved some money.
I should say that Katty deals with numbers all the time and is currently working as a financial auditor - so money (other people's) and numbers are her thing.
We spotted a dining table, chairs, bed, mattress etc and said we would pay cash for it all today - depending on the deal they could do for us. When the management went away to work out a discount, Katty noticed that to buy the table and chairs separately was actually cheaper than to buy them as a set in the 'so-called' sale!!!!! She raised this with the shop and they were very sheepish about it.
We did some further checking with the quotes we had from some weeks ago and found that items - which were now supposed to be on sale - were exactly the same price!!!! Stay skeptical of those so called deals out there folks......I am sure this is a legal advertising issue that most shops do.....but hey.
We argued for a good deal and based on our spotting the problem with their numbers we did quite well......keep an eye out folks.....when is a sale not a sale?
Katty asked me if that qualifies her as a skeptic (as she spotted it and investigated it further) - I replied - indeed it does.......
Any laws broken do we think? Or is it perfectly legit?
The only retail law I can think of that relates to sale items is the amount of time they have to be on display at full price for before being reduced.
Shops are not obliged to sell you anything at the advertised price, however if they use a 25% discount angle to get people into their shop, and the goods are not in fact reduced in price, I would have thought they could get into trouble.
I've got some retail law stuff somewhere, I'll dig it out. It might be worth a firm letter to their head office, at the least you might get some free vouchers or something for the inconvenience.
Yes, definitely sounds dodgy to me.
There are rules and regulations and companies like DFS and Safestyle UK, which have perma-sales on, have to make sure that they sticking to the rules.
It's all advertising though - a deception! :o
That could be a good topic - is advertising a form of deception? :D
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I think it is a valid area for skeptics to look at. I also think many members would welcome further information on this.
Interestingly enough a similar sort of thing occurs in supermarkets. You find that 2 litre items turn out more expensive than buying 2 x 1 litre items
Waitrose are quite good about that, if you look carefully at the shelf tags for the item it'll give you the "Price per 100g\Kilo\Litre"Originally Posted by median
Interestingly enough a similar sort of thing occurs in supermarkets. You find that 2 litre items turn out more expensive than buying 2 x 1 litre items
Yes they are, and they sell really lovely deli food and stuff, but by golly their normal household groceries are overpriced. A four-pack of Nouvelle toilet tissue is £1.89 in Waitrose, compared to £1.30 in Tesco and £1.00 in the pound shop.Waitrose are quite good about that, if you look carefully at the shelf tags for the item it'll give you the "Price per 100g\Kilo\Litre"Interestingly enough a similar sort of thing occurs in supermarkets. You find that 2 litre items turn out more expensive than buying 2 x 1 litre items
Call me a chav, but since I discovered the pound shop, I won't buy cleaning materials anywhere else.
Tracy "pound shop" King.
You know what else totally staggered me recently? How cheap going to a greengrocer is compared to supermarket fruit and veg, ditto butchers. It's a bit of a walk but really worth it - it's amazing how you get used to supermarket prices and don't stop to think about how expensive they really are. And overpackaged, too.
Anyway, enough little-old-lady ranting from me, I'm starting to sound like my own nan.
There is a pound shop in Walthamstow had a sale and charged 90p for its items.
..... why the HELL do I find that funny!!!??? :D
Have a look at The Undercover Economist by Tim Harford. It's very, very good at talking about pricing and why it works the way it works. His style is very engaging, and he gets into why, for instance, nappies cost the same at Waitrose as at Sainsbury's while the total bill at Waitrose can be higher.
Back to the original post, I think that the shop can charge whatever price they like, but if their advertising says that it's 25% off and it's the same price as before the sale, then surely they're in breach of the rules on advertising standards. i.e. they're making a claim that is demonstrably untrue.
I think they have to have offered the same product at the higher price for a certain amount of time within a certain time of the "sale".
The law may well have changed since I studied but, so far as I'm aware, a price displayed in UK shops is not an "offer" but "an invitation to treat." There's a big difference.
On a slightly related note, I was recently wondering about all the adverts for sales proclaiming "Offer must end on Sunday" (or whenever). Obviously my first thought was simply why must it end? Last week though at least one of the people saying this decided to extend the offer another week. Would this mean that the original advert could be complained about for lying, since clearly the statement "must end" was not true.
A shop near me used to have a hand-lettered sign saying something like "all items half marked price seven days". Nicely ambiguous. It was up for several years; the "seven days" referred to the fact that it was open on Sundays...
I always laugh at the claim that "due to the amazing success of our sale we're extending it for another week".
In other words the sale went worse than expected and they still haven't shifted the old stock they wanted rid of.
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