Tesco fined £300k over half-price strawberry con

TESCO has been fined £300,000 in a landmark court case after it misled thousands of shoppers with a bogus half-price strawberry promotion. The supermarket admitted four offences linked to the sale of punnets of strawberries in 2,300 stores across the country at a ‘half-price’ figure of £1.99.

Britain’s biggest grocer used an original price of £3.99 to justify the bargain claim. However, this higher figure only applied for a very short period.

Tesco has admitted the claims of big savings were misleading and it has now been fined £300,000 and ordered to pay £65,000 in costs.

The ruling will serve as a warning to all supermarkets, who stand accused of using a raft of underhand tactics to tempt shoppers through the doors.

Birmingham Crown Court heard that the half-price promotion was instrumental in generating strawberry sales of some £52million with a profit of £2.3million. Judge Michael Chambers QC said: ‘The promotion was not a genuine bargain. It was false and misleading. The offer should never have been made in the first place by a national retailer. It was patently wrong.’ He said the case was ‘ shocking by its very nature’ because consumers had a ‘ high degree of trust’ in chains such as Tesco. As a result, he decided to levy what is a very large fine in terms of trading standards law.

The case only reached the courts thanks to the tenacity of elderly shopper Daphne Smallman, who saw the strawberry bargain claims when in a Tesco at Sheldon, Birmingham, in the summer of 2011.

It turned out that the £3.99 figure had applied for a very short period, however the half-price deal ran for a much longer 14 weeks through the summer.

This was at odds with guidelines in the Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations Act 2008. A general rule of thumb is that an offer price should not carry on for a longer period than an item was sold at full price. Mrs Small- man understood that the original price of £3.99 might have been fair at the start of the strawberry season when the fruit was in short supply.

However, she knew it was unfair to keep using this high figure when strawberries were plentiful and farmers were supplying them at low prices.

It is exactly this tactic that all of the supermarkets have used for years to give the impression they are offering bargains on seasonal fruit and vegetables.

Mrs Smallman was identified in court as making the complaint, however, she died earlier this year, aged 78, before the case was resolved.

She took up the matter with her local trading standards office which pursued the case to the point that Tesco felt it had no choice but to admit misleading shoppers.

Birmingham council’s head of trading standards, Sajeela Naseer, stressed the ruling was significant for the way products were promoted in future. ‘Food pricing, presentation and the depiction of promotional practices is a crucial issue for retailers, and in turn, consumers.’

Tesco had tried to kill off the prosecution earlier this year by arguing that Birmingham council did not have the power to pursue a case involving offences outside its borders. Yesterday, however the store admitted its guilt, although it insisted the misleading promotion was the result of a one-off human error, rather than a wider attempt to deceive customers.

A store spokesman said: ‘We sell over 40,000 products in our stores, with thousands on promotion at any one time, but even one mistake is one too many.’