Commerce Commission investigating supermarkets

Monday, 22 January 2024

The Commerce Commission is investigating the major supermarket operators’ pricing and promotional practices.

It said on its website that it was investigating Woolworths New Zealand, Foodstuffs North Island and Foodstuffs South Island.

Between them, they are responsible for all Woolworths, Countdown, New World, Pak’nSave and Four Square supermarkets.

It opened the investigation, which will look at potential breaches of the Fair Trading Act, after a complaint from Consumer NZ.

“The focus of the investigations, which are in the early stages, is to consider whether certain pricing and promotional practices of the parties comply with the Fair Trading Act. As these are ongoing investigations, we are unable to provide any further comment,” the commission said.

For nine months, Consumer NZ ran a campaign to “end dodgy specials” at the supermarket and asked shoppers to send in examples of unclear or misleading pricing and promotional practices.

From September to the end of June, it received a total of 602 complaints about problematic pricing. In June alone, it received 80 examples.

The problems included instances of people being charged more than the advertised price, misleading multibuys and “specials that were not special”, Consumer NZ said.

It said in August it shared the information gathered during Juen with the Commerce Commission and asked it to investigate.

The Fair Trading Act prohibits false and misleading behaviour by businesses in the promotion and sale of goods and services.

A spokesperson for Woolworths said it had been contacted about pricing complaints the commission had received since September 2022.

“We will co-operate fully but it is not appropriate for us to comment further.”

A Foodstuffs spokesperson said it was aware of the investigation and it, too, would co-operate fully.

“We take pricing and promotion accuracy and integrity very seriously every day. We’ve made ongoing improvements to our pricing and promotional processes across our co-ops and have also been implementing the Commerce Commission’s final recommendations following their market study into the supermarket industry, regularly publicly reporting on our progress.”