Proactive Investors - Major UK retailers are often misleading customers over how good the deals are on their loyalty card schemes, according to an investigation by consumer group Which?
Supermarket and chemist chains frequently raised the non-member price to make their loyalty offers look better, the research found, having examined 12,000 prices and deals at Tesco PLC (LON:TSCO), J Sainsbury PLC (LON:SBRY), Boots (NASDAQ:WBA), Superdrug, Morrisons, Asda and Coop.
Some "very questionable" prices were offered to customers who are not members of loyalty schemes, along with some products that are continuously on loyalty promotion and others that never return to their non-member price when the offer ends.
Which checked how many times a certain group of items' prices for non-members had been in place during the previous six months to establish whether the discount offered to members was real or not.
Morrisons and Superdrug were the worst offenders here, with 20% 16% of the products moved to the higher non-member price for less than half the time, followed by 10% for Boots, which is part of Walgreens Boots Alliance Inc (NASDAQ:WBA) and Tesco, dropping to 5% at Sainsbury’s and 3% at Co-op.
As an example, Tesco offered an 18-can pack of Stella Artois lager cans at a price for non-members of £16.99, with members getting them for £13.
But Which noted that they had only been £16.99 for seven days before the loyalty promotion started and before that, they had been priced at £15.99 since November, so the supermarket raised the non-member price to make its loyalty offer look better.