Fancy a 29p Chocolate Orange?

Everyone loves a bargain. So it’s perhaps unsurprising that Tesco was inundated by chocolate lovers when it started flogging Terry’s Chocolate Oranges for just 29p instead of the recommended £2.75.

But it wasn’t a gesture of goodwill from the supermarket giant. Rather, it was a pricing glitch that resulted from two discount offers being applied to the same product.

Cue shoppers literally buying trolley loads of the chocolate orbs as the word spread rapidly on social media (a Facebook page was even set up in honour of the occasion, aptly titled Terry’s Chocolate Orange glitch: I was there).

Unsurprisingly, Tesco weren’t quite as enthusiastic about the deal and moved to shut down the erroneous offer soon afterwards.

How it happened

The problem arose because there were two separate discount offers applied to the product – a buy-one-get-one-free​ (BOGOF) and a multi-buy.

So here’s how it worked. One chocolate would set you back £2.75, but thanks to the BOGOF it meant you essentially got a discount of £1.37 and a half pence when you bought two.

Then comes the buy-three-for-£5 offer, which equates to a further discount of £3.25. Add it all up and it meant anyone buying six paid just £1.75, instead of the recommended £16.50. Every little helps!

Merry offer at Tesco

It’s merely the latest in a string of pricing blunders at Tesco. In the past, we saw an error at a number of Scottish stores that allowed customers to buy three boxes of alcoholic beverages for £11 instead of £20, a saving of almost 50%.

In another instance, the supermarket was forced to pull its 'Double the Difference' campaign, which promised to pay customers twice the difference in price if they could find products cheaper elsewhere.

Savvy shoppers soon figured out they were indeed able to buy cheaper goods at rival Asda and thus pocket a tidy sum when they took the receipts to Tesco.

We’re sure Asda’s bigwigs enjoyed that. They were probably less pleased, however, when they learned that one of their stores was selling petrol for just 12.9p after staff put a decimal point in the wrong place.

Reports at the time described a 50-long motorcade of motorists desperate to benefit from the bungle at the Rooley Lane, Bradford petrol station.

You win some, you lose some

But before you start feeling sorry for the supermarkets, it’s worth remembering that such glitches often go against us.

The old adage goes that buying bulk is the best way to save, but a report from consumer magazine Which? earlier this year found numerous examples where supermarkets were charging customers more for multi-pack items than those sold individually.

The lesson? Always do the sums before dropping it in your trolley.

Have you ever come across a mispriced bargain? Or maybe a massively overpriced product? Share your experiences below.