Consumer body challenges Tesco on price cuts

A consumer group has asked supermarket giant Tesco to clarify whether many of the goods that were the subject of 5,000 price cuts it has advertised were increased in price shortly before they were reduced.

Tesco announced earlier this month that it had reduced the price of more than 5,000 grocery items since May this year.

However, responding to media reports yesterday, the Consumers' Association of Ireland (CAI) said it was concerned that the price of up to one third of a sample basket of Tesco products may have been raised before they were reduced.

A Sunday Times survey of 39 everyday groceries found that the price of around 33 per cent of items were increased in the months before the abolition of the Groceries Order in March of this year.

Tesco advertisements show thousands of price cuts between May and September of this year. The CAI, however, said that as a result consumers may be paying the same for goods as they did several months ago. CAI chief executive Dermot Jewell said Tesco deserved some credit for its price cuts, but that confusion over the nature of price cuts threatened to undermine this.

"We have lots of consumers saying there is widespread confusion over the elements of pricing and supermarkets need to come clean on this," he said.

A spokesperson for Tesco was unavailable yesterday, although the supermarket has said any price increases prior to May would have applied in other supermarkets as well.

It says its price cuts are set to stay in place for a number of months at least and that shoppers will see an average reduction of 4.7 per cent across 5,000 products. The supermarket chain has also said that prices for goods covered by the Groceries Order have come down by 1.5 per cent since March.

Prices for other goods have risen by less than 0.5 per cent, but this was caused by circumstances beyond the company's control, such as rising beef prices, according to Tesco's Dermot Breen.