Clearer supermarket prices for all!

You don’t have to take up any offers if you don’t want them – such as bogof. As for “sale” prices, we need to ensure that the regulations are followed.When they are not, they should be publicised and worthwhile penalties imposed – as with Tesco and strawberries. Consumers should help by drawing attention to these, to, for example, Which and trading standards. I don’t buy the excuse that “we sell a lot of products and mistakes are sometimes made”. Supermarkets are very professional marketeers and know what they are doing; persistent offenders should be exposed.

Why do we assume that people need someone else to decide for them whether or not they can buy an offer? Surely they can decide for themselves. Those who can benefit from an offer should do so if they choose to, those who won’t benefit simply buy something more appropriate. As you can tell, I believe people should be allowed to exercise freedom of choice and not have the State (or anyone else) dictate how they should behave.

You and I can work out whether an offer is good value for money even if we are not given the unit price for the special offer. Some are not so fortunate and – as I have said before – we should consider the disabled and the elderly.

I have spoken to people who have worked in supermarkets and been told that making pricing difficult to understand is a deliberate ploy to encourage customers to buy more and spend more money.

I have no problem with supermarkets competing on prices but making it difficult for customers to understand pricing is not on. This is a real issue for many customers who are struggling to make ends meet or just don’t want to be cheated.

I have no problem with condemning shops that mislead with pricing. My issue is when we seem to underestimate the ability of most people to make judgements on information and offers that are presented clearly. I don’t see that disabled or elderly people should be singled out as having lost these faculties.
What really worries me is that there is some complacency that simple arithmetic tasks, and basic judgements, are somehow too great a challenge for us and we should dumb everything down to avoid using these basic skills . There must be something fundamentally wrong with our education system if these “life skills” are not acquired at an early age.
Education should address the practical issues we will face in life – including finances.

Lack of numeracy was one of my greatest concerns during my career in science teaching in universities. I produced teaching materials for use by colleagues and for self-help, both on paper and online. I worked with support services to identify how they could provide tailored face-to-face support for struggling students on a confidential basis. I noticed that Greek students tended to be much better than the average home or overseas students at handling numbers and was told that they had not been allowed to use calculators at school. No doubt there are other reasons for the marked decline in numeracy since the 70s. Scientists and engineers who handle numbers on a regular basis will improve their skills through practice, albeit later in life than their elders.

Not everyone shares our concern that a fair proportion of the population is not good at arithmetic. Some could say that numeracy is not very relevant to life in the 21st century. I don’t agree, but at least I now acknowledge that it is not necessary to learn to touch-type to work at a keyboard.

Having studied the issue of supermarket pricing for years, I believe that the majority of people do struggle. I don’t believe that we should force people to try to improve their numeracy by making supermarket pricing more complicated. As people get older they often lose skills and it is predicted that 135 people will be living with dementia by 2050. Not all disabilities are mental, but let’s not make life any harder than it is for the disabled.

All the major supermarkets have agreed to improve how they show their prices and hopefully the latest petition will achieve more in the fight for fair treatment of customers.