Mary backs "Price it right" campaign

Wakefield MP backing Private Members' Bill to help shoppers get the best deals on food

Wakefield MP Mary Creagh is supporting a new Parliamentary Bill to get supermarkets to use clear and simple price labelling to help people save money.  The ‘Consumer Information Bill’, which is backed by the consumer organisation Which?, will make price labels easier for shoppers to understand and is one way to keep more money in people’s pockets when they’re doing their weekly shop.
 
Mary said:  “People in Wakefield are seeing the cost of living go up as their budgets go down. With so many people concerned with rising food prices, it’s never been more important to shop around and compare supermarket prices.

"People are more likely to find the best deals when they check the per unit price displays and yet most people don't because the displays are not clear enough.”

“Everyone who cares about this should visit www.which.co.uk/unitpricing and sign the pledge.”

According to research from Which?, around eight in 10 people are concerned about rising food prices, and half are comparing prices more when shopping for food. They found that people are now choosing carefully where they shop for food, with 57 per cent shopping around more to find the best prices.

Seventy two per cent of people found it annoying when items are not priced by unit, and less than half (46 per cent) thought that the print on shelf labels giving the unit price was large enough to easily read.

A separate piece of research on unit pricing found that while 81 per cent of people were aware of unit pricing, only 55 per cent were using it – the top reason for not doing so being that it is too time consuming (34 per cent) and difficult to compare when measurements are not consistent (29 per cent).

A Which? survey has shown that the chief complaints from shoppers about unit pricing are:

1. The unit price can be very small and difficult to see.
2. Retailers do not always give the unit price when they should.
3. The unit price doesn’t have to be shown for promotions, such as multi-buys.
4. Fruit and vegetables can display the price per item or per Kg making it impossible to compare.
5. Different units are used for varieties of the same product (eg. per 100g and per Kg).