 |
|
|
Among the various misleading deals, the Authority denounced
the well-known ‘was/now’ promotion,
where the discount sales price is advertised as a promotion for longer that the
higher price applied.
It was the consumer campaign
group Which? to raise the alarm in
April and according to CMA senior Director Consumer, Nisha Arora, the complaint
has been a chance to collect and examine a great deal of further evidence on
the strategies supermarkets put into place to attract shoppers.
Refocus consumer protection
is without doubt one of CMA’s main goals, along with extending competition
frontiers and delivering effective enforcement. The creation of the
Competitions and Market Authority (CMA) itself was first suggested by the
Confederation of British Industry who called on the Government to combine the
Office of Fair Trading and the Competition Commission into a Single Competition
Agency. They hoped it would streamline
the previous two-stage process in which the merger review and the market
investigation were carried out by
two different authorities.
According to the CMA’s
report, while shoppers enjoy a wide range of choices and 40 per cent of their
grocery spending goes on items on promotion, there are still hundreds of misleading
offers on the shelves every day and a lack of easily comparable prices,
considering the limitations of unit pricing.
Despite the fact that retailers want to comply with the law to avoid such problems occurring and that dubious offers are not happening in large numbers across the
whole sector, there are still areas of
poor practice that could be in breach of consumer law and confuse shoppers.
Following its most recent
investigation, the CMA has announced a
new set of measures to bring businesses into line and work closely with them to
stop promotional misleading practices and improve compliance, while
bringing greater clarity to shoppers and simplifying the regulations.
Hopefully the next report from
the Competitions and Market Authority will contain more reassuring data and clear
information for the consumer. If not, Which?
will surely be there, standing up for the consumer rights once again.
