VIGILANCE was the message a senior Commerce Ministry official sent out to all consumers yesterday, despite government efforts to protect them from being mislead or taken advantage of.
And although it is entirely illegal to advertise one price and then charge another, it does happen, warned another consumer official.
“Although our department carries out frequent checks at shops around the island, I wouldn’t say consumers are safe. They still need to keep their eyes open and to check and compare prices and sell by dates to ensure they are not being deceived in any way,” Commerce Ministry Acting Director of Competition and Consumer Protection, Leontios Pericleous, told the Cyprus Mail. And although such complaints are not necessarily plentiful, they are not exactly a rarity either, according to Consumer Association General Manager Dinos Ioannou.
Ioannou said there had been a case several months ago when a Nicosia supermarket had mistakenly charged a shopper £70 for a loaf of bread, instead of 70 cents. Because the man had bought a lot of goods on that particular day, he did not notice his mistake until after the transaction had taken place, explained Ioannou.
“Once he noticed how much more he’d paid and pointed it out to the checkout girl, she wrote him out a voucher for £69.30 which was valid for three months,” he said.
“But, once he went home and had time to think about it, he realised he didn’t want to be forced to shop at that particular hypermarket for up to three months, so he went back to the shop and asked for his money back. The problem was, the checkout girl said she could not give him back money from the till. That was when we were contacted and intervened. The manager then apologised and the shopper’s money was returned to him.” Ioannou pointed out that though the man had given his consent to the voucher, and there was nothing illegal in its being issued, he never should have been overcharged in the first place.
“It may have been a genuine mistake, a gimmick, or it may even have been an attempt to see whether or not this could be a way to start issuing vouchers,” he said. “However, it is totally illegal to advertise one price on the shelf and then charge another at the counter. In fact any hypermarket doing so is liable to be sued.”
Admittedly this gross overcharging was a one-off, but, because shoppers rarely check their receipts, errors for lesser sums usually go amiss, he said.
“What can happen is a product is advertised for 29 cents on the shelf and then charged 39 cents at the counter. That is why we warn consumers to double-check their receipts, ensuring that what they thought was the price of a particular merchandise is in fact what they paid for.”
Consumers should not pay a single cent more for a product and are within their legal right to refuse to pay if that is the case, he said.
“Initially hypermarkets had excused such errors in prices when VAT was increased,” said Ioannou. “They claimed that they did not manage to change the prices on all their products. At first this was a reasonable explanation, so we did not see the need to make a fuss. But the new VAT has been in place for several months now and so this can no longer be used as an excuse.” He added that VAT could not be charged at the counter and had to included in the advertised price because consumers could not be expected to calculate the final price in their heads.
In most instances, shoppers prefer to sort out the problem themselves, but if this proves ineffective, the Consumers Association steps in. Fearing bad publicity, this has always resulted in a happy ending for the customer.
“My warning to consumers is that they should compare prices at various supermarkets to see whether or not they are being ripped off, check sell-by dates and always go through their receipts,” said Ioannou.
Ministry official Pericleous agreed with this advice, particularly since understaffing within the Ministry’s consumer protection department was a problem.
“In Nicosia, we have five or six employees that carry out spot checks at various supermarkets, in Limassol three employees, in Larnaca and Famagusta we have one, plus a part-timer, and in Paphos not a single one,” he said. Although this did not mean employees were not dispatched to other towns at least once a month to check up on various supermarkets, it did mean that not all supermarkets could be covered at once, he said.
Supermarkets were aware they were being checked and were therefore unlikely to dupe their customers, said Pericleous.
“But, this doesn’t mean consumers are safe. They should still keep their eyes open and check that what prices they are finally paying and that the products they are buying are not out of date,” he said.
The Cyprus Mail is the only English-language daily newspaper published in Cyprus. It was established in 1945 and today, with its popular and widely-read website, the Cyprus Mail is among the most trusted news sites in Cyprus. The newspaper is not affiliated with any political parties and has always striven to maintain its independence. Over the past 70-plus years, the Cyprus Mail, with a small dedicated team, has covered momentous events in Cyprus’ modern history, chronicling the last gasps of British colonial rule, Cyprus’ truncated independence, the coup and Turkish invasion, and the decades of negotiations to stitch the divided island back together, plus a myriad of scandals, murders, and human interests stories that capture the island and its -people. Observers describe it as politically conservative.
