Would you fall for these dubious supermarket special offers?

I make the most of special offers on non-perishable or freezable products I buy regularly, but generally ignore the piles of special offer stuff inside supermarket doors.

I do however, peruse new products on Ocado and if any look interesting and they are on special offer I might take the opportunity to try them, otherwise I might add them to my favourites to try the next time they are on special offer.

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Shopping today I saw several 1@ £1 50 or 2 for £2. items and others similar at different price points. I didn’t stop to question whether the original price of £1 50 had been hiked, or whether the saving was genuine. With time constraints, I bought the two, since I shall be using them both. Another win for them. I do go in with a list and stick to it. I also know what I’m looking for, but don’t remember what I paid for it last time. Another win for them. I sometimes go through the receipt afterwards and look at where the money went. That can change what I buy next time. My shopping philosophy is to buy what is needed, waste none of it, and balance the food to get a healthy diet. If the supermarket provides this for me, then we’ve both won!

Simply looking at prices is not helpful when pack sizes are becoming smaller. I pay attention to unit prices, which help when comparing different products and deciding whether a special offer is worthwhile. Offers such as four items for the price o f three with the cheapest one ‘free’ annoy me because it’s not possible to work out the unit price. That presumably is the intention.

A friend shops for bargains and calls in with some offerings once or twice a week. Recently it was walnut loaf from Marks & Spencer, reduced from £2.70 to 30p and another bakery item reduced to 10% of the original price. Who is going to pay £2.70 for a small loaf? Tonight I am going to get some greatly reduced food from Waitrose.

I don’t buy ready meals unless they are greatly reduced in price and can go in the freezer. Like Duncan, I’m wary of processed food.

I check the value of offers where we food shop and find them genuine. Quite right to point out the item unit price, wavechange; however if, as in an M&S £10 meal deal say, you want and will use all the components, then if the total comes to less than the individual items I’m more than happy (and they do).

It is a pity we do not have proactive local trading standards to keep an eye on dubious deals and take prompt action if appropriate. I would dearly love to see them restored to doing their proper job, properly funded and being the guardian of consumers (alongside Which?!). I’d happily pay a little more in council tax if that helped.

I am a fan of Ocado – their customer service and their prompt and fully complete deliveries are amongst the very best. However, beware all their special offers and especially on wine. They always have “Special Offers” of up to 30% off. These are seldom genuine offers; you only have to Google the wine in question to see that the offer only brings it back to the correct price; one can only assume that they have previously inflated the price solely in order to create the illusion of an offer. I no longer buy my wine from Ocado.

Sainsbury’s 3-week cycle scam is very trying. I first encountered it on Innocent juice which has 2 sizes 0.9L and 1.35 L. For the first 3 weeks they do the reduction on the big size, which is fine, but then they change it so that the small size has the lower unit price – so you are obliged to buy the smaller size to get the proper value, which for me is inconvenient. I have a photo which shows the two sizes on adjacent shelves, both priced at £2.50. In other words, for the same money, you can have a 50% bigger quantity. Now I find they are doing the same trick with olive oil. Most frustrating. I have complained to Sainsbury but they just say that they are being fair in giving promotions to their customers who prefer the smaller pack. Aye, right!

Recently I have found two instances of on-line website information at variance with the product available on the shelf and I suspect there are more. In the first instance it was the sugar content of Asda’s Smart Price peanut butter. It would appear that this product has had it’s recipe changed as well as the label and it now contains significantly more sugar than before as well as more than it’s competitors at a time everyone is being encouraged to reduce their sugar intake. However, on the Asda website the previous packaging is still shown along with the original nutritional information despite me contacting them several weeks ago. Also related to peanuts, the B&M website is advertising 200 gram packs of KP peanuts but in store the pack size is just 170 grams at the same price. Is this sharp practice or simply an oversight? Keeping websites up-to-date should surely be obligatory for these large companies or do they find it an inconvenience? Should these sorts of thing be something that Trading Standards need to look into if they aren’t doing it already?

A local branch of Sports Direct is closing down in the New Year and has placards claiming “All stock reduced” but when you go in, the bulk of the stock remains at the same price as it is in all the other branches, so no saving. The explanation was that their normal selling price was already discounted from the RRP so there would be no further discount. Is this acceptable as surely the implication of the sign is that everything would be reduced from their normal selling price?