Owner of Polish supermarket chain faces fine for “anti-inflation” promotion

Poland’s state consumer protection agency (UOKiK) has said that the owner of the food retailer giant Biedronka will be fined for its “anti-inflation” promotional campaign. The financial penalties facing the Portuguese-owned Jerónimo Martins Polska will amount to up to 10% of its annual turnover.

This means that the company, whose sales in the year 2021 reached €14.5 billion, faces a fine of more than €1.4 billion (6.57 billion zloty).

However, Biedronka was surprised by the news. “We hadn’t received any official correspondence from UOKiK,” the company’s press office said in a statement.

In a nationwide promotional campaign entitled Biedronka’s Anti-inflation Shield, referring to the similarly named government measures intended to soften the blow of rising inflation, the chain pledged to maintain a fixed regular price for 150 of its most frequently purchased products from 12 April to 30 June, at a time when inflation in Poland was soaring to levels not seen in decades.

When advertising this promotion, the chain assured that if customers found these products at lower prices in other shops, Biedronka would refund them the difference.

In practice, as the antitrust authority pointed out, the customers would have to buy the product, both in Biedronka and in the other shop (from a list of the most popular food chains) within the same week.

Then, after a cumbersome verification process, the customer would receive a discount code, also to be redeemed within a week, to use at Biedronka for the amount of the price difference.

As a result, no one took part in the promotion, reported industry news service Portal Spożywczy at the beginning of July, citing information from the owner of Biedronka.

According to the chain’s commercial director, no one reported lower prices because no one has found any. The authority, on the other hand, pointed out as early as April that participation in the promotion may be “unprofitable and burdensome” for consumers.

According to the antitrust authority, this process and the fact that the terms and conditions of the promotion were not available in shops, but only digitally on the chain’s website, demonstrated a lack of goodwill on the company’s part.

“The rules seemed simple, the promise tempting, but the reality turned out to be different,”  said the president of the Office of Competition and Consumer Protection (UOKiK), Tomasz Chróstny, as quoted in the statement.

“We verified how the benefits of the promotion and the rules of participation were presented to customers and concluded that the advertising messages may have misled consumers about the conditions of the promotion, which is related to its complexity and therefore to the inconvenience for the chain’s customers to take advantage of it.”

Chróstny added that “the attempt to stand out in the market from other businesses cannot be carried out on the basis of catchy but false advertising slogans”.

In response to enquiries by TVN24, the Biedronka press office issued a statement stressing that “the company has for years been doing everything to offer best deals on the market to its customers”, explaining that “all these promotional campaigns” are supposed to save the money of Polish clients.

“We are surprised at the information that all round the media,” they stated. “Up until this moment we haven’t received any formal correspondence from UOKiK”.

Main photo credit: Biedronka press materials

Alicja Ptak

Alicja Ptak is senior editor at Notes from Poland and a multimedia journalist. She previously worked for Reuters.