Sign could have stopped sticker stoush

Someone has laid a complaint with the Commerce Commission over New World’s Smeg knife promotion.

A frustrated New World customer who cannot get one of the supermarket chain’s promotional knife blocks has lodged a Commerce Commission complaint alleging a breach of the Fair Trading Act.

New World’s owner Foodstuffs has run a highly-successful giveaway of Smeg knives and knifeblocks over summer. But the company has all but run out of the blocks and says it cannot get any more.

The customer, an Auckland businessman who didn’t want to be named, said he believed continuing the promotion when New World knew the star attraction was unavailable amounted to misleading conduct under the Act.

Foodstuffs says it is confident it hasn’t breached the law, but Consumer New Zealand say the man may have a case – and says New World stores that have run out of stock should be posting signs to warn customers before they buy groceries in the hope of securing a knife block. . . 

They are very good knives.

We usually shop at New World and with catering for a couple of Christmas parties, buying ingredients to make 21 Christmas cakes and some other reasonably big shops it wasn’t hard for my farmer and me to collect enough stickers to get all the knives we wanted.

Others have been slower to collect the stickers you get with every $20 spend and are finding they can’t redeem them.

The booklet in which you stick the stickers makes it quite clear the promotion is only while stocks last. However, shoppers probably don’t know that stocks are low or, in many cases, no more until they try to redeem their stickers.

It has probably been a very good promotion for the supermarkets if people have, as I did a few times, added something extra to their trolleys to ensure they got another sticker and I am sure I’m not the only one to be grateful to have a new supply of good, sharp knives in my kitchen.

But at least some of the good will have been undone by the disgruntled who haven’t been able to get the knives they wanted as stocks ran out.

The staff at my local warned me when stocks were running low and it’s very much a first world problem but Consumer is right. A sign could have stopped the sticker stoush by warning people before they shopped that supplies of the knives and knife blocks had run out.