Tesco’s rip-off at tills

Offers on shelves are out of date, but customers aren’t told – so pay more

TESCO has been routinely overcharging shoppers at the tills, according to a damning investigation.

Most customers do not usually bother to go through their receipt after a shopping trip, assuming supermarket technology will not get prices wrong.

But it appears that about two thirds of Tesco’s outlets have not been updating the shelf prices for items regularly enough.

And the vast majority of the errors involved overcharging rather than undercharging, the investigation found. The problem involved multibuy deals that remained advertised on the shelves long after they had ended. Consequently people who were tempted by an offer may have ended up paying full price.

For example, packs of Christmas gingerbread were listed at £1.75 each or two for £3, but the saving was not made at the till. Another ‘deal’ involving burgers and bottles of guacamole sauce saw a shopper pay 60 per cent more than the shelf price – an extra £3.30.

One store offered two Viennetta ice cream packs for £2, however the till rang up the normal full price of £1.37 each.

And a pack of 12 tins of Whiskas cat food was listed at £3.50 or three packs for £8, however the deal was not recognised at the till.

Jars of Chicken Tonight sauce marked £1 on the shelf were also charged at £1.79. The discrepancies will be revealed on BBC’s Inside Out programme this evening.

The findings will raise suspicion that the same thing is happening in other supermarkets and across the high street.

A survey of 50 Tesco stores in the West Midlands, Liverpool and Leeds, over a three month period found 33 were regularly short changing customers on offers. When challenged over the discrepancy, Tesco staff honoured the shelf price offer, however trading standards say that was not good enough.

Martin Fisher, from the Chartered Trading Standards Institute, said: ‘If customer A has come back and complained and been refunded that doesn’t mean there weren’t 20 other customers who didn’t spot it and didn’t complain.’

One member of staff captured on film said there were not enough people to remove offer labels that are out of date. She said: ‘It’s called short staffed. They’ve cut the department in half.’

In some cases, staff failed to remove out-of-date labels from the shelves even after being warned that the offer prices were wrong.

At a Tesco Express in Birmingham, one out-of-date offer price was still on display a month after the error was first pointed out. Mr Fisher said: ‘That is very bad. It’s pretty basic that if one customer has shown something wrong then it’s put right to stop other customers being misled.

‘The longer the offer is wrong the bigger the failure of diligence and the more worried I am frankly.’

He said customers were being misled so alarm bells should be ringing. ‘If there are too many offers changing too frequently so store staff cannot understand them and comply with all the changes that is something Tesco head office needs to think about,’ he added.

Tesco has promised to doublecheck the accuracy of the price labels at all its 3,500 stores as a result of the investigation.

A spokesman said: ‘We take great care to deliver clear and accurate price labels for our customers so they can make informed decisions on the products they buy.

‘We are disappointed that errors occurred and will be working with the stores involved to reinforce our responsibilities to our customers.’

‘Failure of diligence’