Pensioner takes two years to expose a Supermarket

It's clearly worth taking up a fight and sticking with it.

This story is all over the papers today/yesterday: here in the Independent:

Tesco fined £300,000 over misleading strawberries offer

 I'm aware that in a lot of cases big business is breaking all the rules that it can get away with.

This time it is Tesco, next it could be Persimmons, yes it could even be Persimmons. (Please remind me, my memory is failing  - aren't they the house builders putting up houses at the end of Union Lane Ulverston (- with the name Hoad View - as long as you haven't got a house directly in front of you blocking the view)- you know the 'what no roundabout' story.) It just takes someone with persistence to stick at a project and eventually they can strike a David and Goliath blow for the 'little man'. My what courage and persistence fighting for what is 'right'. In this case Daphne Smallman (what an appropriate name!) has struck out for all of us that get duped by misleading statements.

What I find is sickening is the way, only after the are found guilty and fined, do they come up with their "sorry, sorry, ever so soooooory" statements. Up till that point I bet the fought like demons.

”It was the council's case, confirmed by Tesco's guilty pleas, that this was a misleading offer which deceived the purchasers of strawberries over many weeks during the summer of 2011.”
In a statement Tesco said: “We apologise sincerely for this mistake, which was made in the summer of 2011. 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.”

Yeh, yeh, yeh -  make it sound an exception and shift the blame elsewhere. "It wasn't us but the ignorant people that work for us" - pull the other leg (if you're lucky enough to have one).

Let's not fool ourselves, it's not just Tesco's. We complained to our Ulverston Coop for what seemed a similar practice last year. Let's all remind our big supermarket giants to behave themselves by quoting this case to them "I wish to complain about your 'half price' policy : if you don't stop it we'll do a Daphne Smallman on you. Remember £300,000 is not cheap." Let August 20th become a national holiday for all the Smallmen in this world."

Thank you Daphne for a wonderful gift.