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Shoppers should boycott dishonest retailers

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Retail giant Nakumatt was caught pants down – quite literally robbing its customers through a mispricing scheme. This is not only illegal, but immoral.

And it’s not just Nakumatt. I fell victim of this scheme recently at another leading supermarket. I went out to buy a simple text-marker pen. On was marked Sh75 on the shelf, but at the till the barcode price was Sh155. I returned the pen to the shelf and walked away. Little did I know it was part of big scam by our retailers.

Nakumatt says: It was a mistake

The retail business has been expanding very fast and supermarkets dot every street in towns. The leaders in this race are Nakumatt, Tuskys, Naivas and Uchumi. This growth has had a good effect on the country’s socio-economic fabric. Many jobs have been created, in the thousands. More taxes are being paid to the government. Local suppliers have a market for their supplies. 

With a growing economy, consumption has grown, providing the demand that has fueled an appetite for growth among supermarkets. With this kind of vicious competition, consumers expect fair pricing and great bargains. Yet the case of Nakumatt where the prices displayed on the shelf for some items is different from what the buyer pays at the counter turns that into wishful thinking.

The supermarket has been taking advantage of the fact that very few shoppers would notice the tiny variations. For a supermarket with a footfall in the millions in a year, that’s a quite a fortune. I am not sure how long this has been happening at Nakumatt, but you would imagine for quite some time, or perhaps many years.

The management has promised to look into the matter. Hope the government is not buying into that statement. The price variations can’t be a mistake. The scheme looks very organised. Otherwise, the stock-takers would have noticed discrepancies in the cost goods sold and cash received.

Consumer Protection and the Competition laws are very clear on this. Any retailer found guilty of mispricing should be punished. Nakumatt should not be an exception. It should, in fact, serve as an example to the rest. Consumers should vote with their feet and boycott such retailers. That’s the only way to deter such deviant behaviour.

But again the government itself is so inefficient in its oversight role, it takes non-state actors to identify such infringements on consumers. This should be a wake-up call for the authorities to start shining the spotlight in many other retail areas like quality and quantity (weights and measures), standardisation and the recent branding craze by supermarkets.

But at the end, it’s the consumers to be more vigilant. Especially so in high turnover transactions where small amounts are involved like banking.

 


The writer is managing editor of businesstoday.co.ke. Views expressed here are his own. Email: [email protected]

 

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LUKE MULUNDA
LUKE MULUNDAhttp://Businesstoday.co.ke
Managing Editor, BUSINESS TODAY. Email: [email protected]. ke
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