Are supermarkets' promotions misleading?

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Last July the Competitions and Market Authority (CMA) published a document that highlighted how supermarkets in the UK are confusing customers with their aggressive sales tactics and widely varying prices and offers.

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.