By Kate Harvey
Content Manager | Pou Whakahaere Ihirangi
A Consumer NZ member who lives in Oamaru got in touch to let us know how fed up she was after a trip to the supermarket.
Having carefully gone through the Woolworths mailer looking for discounts, our member decided to make a lasagne, because the Diamond lasagne sheets were advertised as being on special.
“Most pensioners like us can’t afford to buy more than a few essentials, so I had a short list to make a couple of planned meals over the weekend,” she said.
But when she got to the pasta aisle, she found the lasagne sheets were excluded from the sale on Diamond pasta products. “Why can’t we trust our weekly mailer prices?” she asked us.
We checked out the price at a local Woolworths and confirmed that the lasagne sheets weren’t on special, even though the mailer said they would be.
A Woolworths spokesperson told us the photo of the lasagne sheets shouldn’t have been included in the mailer.
“We know how important it is for our customers that all of our tickets are accurate and the prices we advertise are the prices customers are charged at the checkout,” they said.
“We have over 3.5 million transactions in our stores each week, and sometimes errors do occur.”
What are your rights if a supermarket advertises the wrong price?
A store doesn’t have to sell you a product at the advertised price if it genuinely made an error.
However, Woolworths has a policy of refunding customers if they’re charged more than the advertised price. In other words, if our member had bought the pasta and then shown staff the incorrect mailer, she would have got her lasagne sheets for free – a bigger bonus than the discount she had been expecting!
Under the policy, if she’d bought more than one box of the lasagne sheets, she would have been refunded the full price of one box and the difference between the advertised and actual price on any others.
Foodstuffs, which has the New World and Pak’nSave brands, has a similar policy.
