Which? doesn’t run a supermarket, but if it did…

Tesco manage to get prices wrong all the time, you’d think they’d have someone check them or at least one of the thousand or so people who put the price stickers on the shelves raise it with senior management.

Some fine examples of their incompetence can be found https://www.facebook.com/pages/Tesco-Offer-Fail/109092949114632

In my view, in the Sainsbury tag above the “per kg” is far too small relative to the price. However, if and when a time comes when we can be certain the they have not done a “Tesco” and snuck in a “price per lb” with the “lb” so small it can be missed. then this would be accepteble.
This time can never come untill and unless the UK government make it a specific offence the use non metric units at any point in the retain market place.
OK, I know that will never happen, especially with Which? lobbying the government to keep old and outdated units. I can dream though.

Thanks for publicising the problems we have with supermarket pricing and giving praise for good practice.

One of the main problems is failure to give a unit price for a multi-buy offer, only for the individual item. It’s not rocket science and is something that could be sorted out very quickly.

I don’t condone pricing of one item in grams and the other in millilitres, though for many products they are more or less interchangeable. The obvious solution is to sell all supermarket products by weight, which may not seem intuitive but there is no reason why this could not be done.

As for the shopper who did not know how to interconvert grams and kilograms – I give up hope.

I was in Aldi recently and wanted to buy fresh fruit and vegetables but was put off by the price signs hanging from the ceiling above the produce. I could not match the description of the produce with the description on the price sign above the produce. I thought a 250g of plum baby tomatoes was 79p as no other price was displayed for baby tomatoes. Also I could not see the weight on the label as it was too high and too small. When I got to the till and saw the price was 99p, I told the cashier to remove them from my bill as the price was not clearly displayed by the produce.

When shopping in Aldi and Lidl, I often fail to identify the correct price because of the slap happy way they have of showing prices.

I’ve notice a change for the better in recent weeks at my local Sainsbury’s (Winchmore Hill, London). Fruit and sweets seem to be priced and unit price is shown. The Which? campaign is having a good effect. Let’s hope it continues.

Three days ago I noticed that the Sainsburys website is calculating the price per 100g for olives incorrectly. Sainsbury’s Pitted Black Olives 185g are shown as £0.56/unit, £0.66/100g. On the MySupermarket website they’re shown correctly as Sainsbury’s Pitted Black Olives (185g) 56p (30.3p/100g). I spent a while checking other items and found that this problem is rife among the olives – probably elsewhere too if I know anything about computers! The more I checked the more annoyed I became as this calculation isn’t exactly rocket science and the error makes a nonsense of Sainsburys claim to be making it easy to compare prices and find the best buy. By the time I went back to my shopping, half the contents of my basket had disappeared, shortly to be followed by the rest. I decided to shop at Tesco instead and phoned Customer Services to express my annoyance. The person I spoke to said he’d email the website people about the error but it still hasn’t been corrected. Watch out at Sainsburys Online! Do your own calculations (though this shouldn’t be necessary, for goodness sake!) or check prices on MySupermarket.co.uk.

I wish the supermarkets would obey the law, and stop selling milk in plastic bottles in two-pint containers AND litres right next to each other on the same shelves. It’s totally random what kind of bottle you’re likely to pick up and unless you check the “price per” sticker (if you can even find it) very difficult to see the true price comparison.

Selling milk by the pint is illegal dammit. Oh – I know, they’re not selling it by the pint, they’re just selling it in a 1135mL container with a big prominent “2” on the front (without the word ‘pint’). But that’s just gaming the system. And for what? Who cares what the units are anyway – just we’d surely all like to have two bottles that *look* the same actually *be* the same.

And since this is the 21st century and all that, we’d expect litres and multiples theof wouldn’t we? Every other fluid in the shop is sold like that.

Except (oddly) Evaporated Milk which is sold by the gram! Why is that??

You’ll love the coffee I saw this week – Taylors of Harrogate espresso beans 1 kilo bag is £1,499 per 100g and the mis-priced Maximuscle £33.60 for 908g = £33.60 per kilo, is still wrong FOUR MONTHS later, despite reporting it 5 times!