Supermarkets are finding new ways of making customers pay more for their shopping - Yorkshire Post Letters

It seems like most of the major supermarkets are finding new ways of trying to make customers pay more for their shopping.

Many own-brand products appear to have been withdrawn from the shelves so shoppers are having to pay-through-the-nose for the dearer 'branded' equivalent.

Many ‘special offers’ are now dependent upon the customer having some sort of loyalty card.

In a lot of instances the product that is on offer is not available on the shelf and the 'deal' has been advertised in the media is purely a ploy to encourage shoppers into their stores. Ironically, the day after the offer ends the shelves are full of the product.

Another ploy supermarkets are using is sticking 'yellow' price labels on products to make it appear that they are on offer when in fact they are at the usual retail price.

Worst of all, prices placed underneath products on the shelf that appear to make it look like a good deal actually relate to a completely different product and you only find that out when you get to the checkout.

This happens so regularly that it appears to be a deliberate deception. Some supermarkets take this scam a step further and stick a large price label on 'special offer' baskets that contain a product only to find that the label does not relate to the contents of the baskets.

You can only spot this if you have a magnifying glass to read the small print on the label. I have reported specific cases of this to Trading Standards but they are too idle to follow it up and tell customers to instead report it to Citizens Advice who have no powers to actually do anything about it.

At a time when many families are struggling to feed their families the supermarkets are more concerned about increasing their profit margins.