Ever been to any Rewe or Penny at Saturdays? They usually have the bright yellow "action price/Sonderangebot" signs on the shelves which are valid only from the following Monday. It's a real nuisance.
It used to be even worse in Britain before the invasion of Aldi and Lidl really had an impact.
They had lots of 'buy 5, pay 3' and similar nonsense deals. Often, the software in the register would "mysteriously" not have the deal, and you pay more.
And, of course, a 50% reduction usually meant that they just doubled the price in the week before.
Things got much better in the last ten years or so. That's roughly when Lidl and Aldi really started eating Tescos lunch.
That is really something which rubs me the wrong way. There is no (to my knowledge) comprehensive public place/site where one could see this price devolopment over time, visualize it, show the regional differences, by vendor, product, package size/amount/volume/weight/per piece, and so on. No transparency at all. IMO this should exist. But it doesn't.
In german i'd say: Fortwährende Vortäuschung falscher Tatsachen! which translates roughly to 'sustained simulation of staged facts'.
The thing is that British grocers got regularly fined (and talked to sternly) for these kinds of practiced. But they kept finding ways around the regulations or just ignoring them.
What really helped in the end to rein the practice in was new competition from abroad.
British retail banking is similarly customer unfriendly. For example a few years ago (no clue whether that's still the case), you could NOT not have an overdraft. They called it an 'unarranged overdraft'. Instead of just letting you tell the bank to refuse to let you got even a penny below zero, they still gave you the money (to an extent) but with a hefty fee.
They also ordered your outgoing bills or standing orders for the day in decreasing size: that's the order that maximizes that number of items that hit your account when its below zero.
They regularly got dinged by their regulators. Nothing much changed.
This time the new competition didn't come from overseas, but from upstarts like Monzo.
I don't know whether the incumbent British retail banks have gotten their act together yet. But last time I checked they were at least afraid and scrambling.
