Tesco fined for offences over strawberry promotion

19th Aug 2013 14:59

Supermarket giant Tesco has been fined after a shopper filed a complaint over a promotion on a 400g punnet of strawberries. The company incurred the £0.3m fine for "misleading customers" by selling the product at the promotional price of £1.99 for longer than it did at the original price of £3.99. Tesco admitted that by running the offer for a period of 14 weeks, significantly longer than the length of time the product was sold at its original price, it had committed an offence under the Consumer Protection from the Unfair Trading Regulations Act 2008. The company was also found to have committed an offence with another similar promotion. Trading Standards, to which the original complaint was made, estimated the company had earned an additional £2.32m in profit as a result of the promotion. The court concluded that while Tesco had committed the offences, it did not deliberately set out to mislead customers."We apologise sincerely for this mistake, which was made in the summer of 2011," the company said in a statement. "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."Since then, to make sure this doesn't happen again, we've given colleagues additional training and reminded them of their responsibilities to ensure we always adhere to the guidelines on pricing."