Tesco’s 29p Chocolate Orange Leaves None Left for Terry

By Laura Elliott.

Tesco’s UK sales figures may be at their lowest in twenty years, but at least one luxury item has been flying off the shelves. A computer glitch at the tills has left surprised customers able to pick up Terry’s Chocolate Oranges for just 29p – a tenth of their usual value. Once the error became clear, some shoppers filled their baskets with the chocolates and cleared entire supermarkets of their stock. One man reportedly bought 192 of the products, which normally sell for £2.75, at a cost of just £57 – saving himself an amazing £471.

The computer error seems to have affected all Tesco stores apart from the Tesco Express outlets, but a spokesman for the struggling supermarket giant has refused to comment on how many oranges were sold, or how much it had cost the company.  A facebook page has already been created entitled ‘Terry’s Chocolate orange glitch, I was there’, and has been deluged with people posting photos of their hordes of chocolates, as well as the too-good-to-be-believed receipts which accompany them.

Within hours of the unfortunate glitch finding its way onto a money-saving website, 57 pages of comments had accumulated from hundreds of excited shoppers. The error occurred because customers were able to combine a three-for-£5 deal on chocolate oranges with another buy-one-get-one-free offer. However, the computer error at the tills meant that they accidentally also applied a further discount when the chocolates were bought in multiples of six. The combination of all of these mistakes meant that the treats from Terry were sold at a tenth of their original £2.75 price.

A spokeswoman for Tesco said the error only lasted “a couple of hours”. She commented that Tesco “deals with 35,000-40,000 products, so sometimes these things happen. We have made lots of people very happy”. She would not disclose the cause of the glitch or how many Chocolates Oranges were sold on the deal, but added: “We are putting steps in place to make sure that it does not happen again”.

The money saving website www.hotukdeals.com first published the deal at noon on Tuesday, and within minutes members were posting pictures of their receipts and stacks of the chocolates. In a week which has seen Tesco losing out on sales, cutting down its profits, and losing market share to its competitors, this is a set-back that even Dawn French – who famously advertised the popular treats– would struggle to make Tesco’s directors find funny.

Short URL: http://www.internationalsupermarketnews.com/?p=5182

Posted by admin on Oct 13 2011. Filed under Product News, Retail News, Retail technology, Supermarkets. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry