The UK government is to analyse how supermarkets can make prices clearer for shoppers after an investigation by the competition watchdog.
The department for business said it would consider simplifying price legislation as part of a consultation expected to launch in the next few weeks. It wants to make it easier for shoppers to compare the prices of individual items such as a banana or tomato, which can be priced by number or by weight.
The consumer minister, Nick Boles, said: “Shoppers need to be able to get the best deal and make comparisons easily so we will look at how we can make information on price as clear and as simple as possible.”
The Chartered Trading Standards Institute also on Thursday launched a consultation on the pricing practices guide with the aim of clarifying how the law applies to certain promotional practices.
Proposed changes in its draft regulations include the removal of a rule that retailers would have to sell an item for 28 days at a particular price to establish that as its “genuine price” from which discounts are measured. It says instead that behaviour would be considered in context and retailers should not use “an artificially manipulated higher price to claim a saving”.
The action comes in response to a report from the competition regulator which criticised the UK’s leading supermarkets over their pricing. The Competition & Markets Authority’s three-month inquiry uncovered evidence of “poor practice that could confuse or mislead shoppers”.
The CMA investigation was launched following a “super-complaint” lodged by the consumer group Which? in April, which claimed supermarkets had duped shoppers out of hundreds of millions of pounds through misleading pricing tactics.
Which? submitted a dossier setting out details of “dodgy multi-buys, shrinking products and baffling sales offers” to the authority, saying retailers were creating the illusion of savings, with 40% of groceries sold on promotion. Supermarkets were fooling shoppers into choosing products they might not have bought if they knew the full facts, it complained.
In its response to the super-complaint, the CMA said the problems raised by the investigation were “not occurring in large numbers across the whole sector” and that retailers were generally taking compliance seriously. But it admitted more could be done to reduce the complexity in the way individual items were priced, particularly with complex “unit pricing”.
Jonathan Neale, managing director of buying at Aldi, said: “Consumers want clear, simple and consistent pricing wherever they shop, not ambiguous or confusing gimmicks.”
