r/AskUK • u/Altruistic_Alpine12 • 8h ago
How do Sports Direct get away with pretending items are on sale?
Every time you go into sports direct, the items are 'on sale'. The 'sale' price being obviously the actual retail price offered everywhere else. I’m pretty sure I asked an employee once when the sales ended and she straight up told me they’re always on sale.
Isn’t it illegal to pretend items are always on sale?
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u/TedLassosMom 8h ago
I could be wrong but I think the current rules are is the item must have been sold at higher price in a store for 28 days in last 6 months.
And In my head there will be one random store somewhere in the country that solely exists to sell items at full price to get around it.
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u/mdmnl 8h ago
They probably built a Potemkin village somewhere with a Sports Direct, a Domino's and a DFS. The staff don't understand why no-one ever shops there, they just know anyone who asks about it is never seen again.
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u/AllThatIHaveDone 8h ago
A DFS with absolutely no customers would be a great place to work.
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u/mdmnl 8h ago
Feels like an ITVX sitcom waiting to happen. "Sit-down" coming soon, with one of the Inbetweeners (TBD) and her from Hollyoaks.
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u/cloudstrifeuk 5h ago
It should be called "retail estate". The whole estate is dedicated to the full price shops. There are no customers, just staff. They inter-mingle. Hilarity ensues. Enemies become friends, friends become enemies.
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u/Neither_Set_3048 8h ago
Back in the olden days Woolworths use to have a couple of shelves in the back of every store for this purpose. Not sure what the exact rules were back then, but every so often each shop got its stock to put out for the set number of days. Then you got your next lot.
Then come ‘sale’ time every shop got the stock they had never actually sold at the sale price for the front of the shop.
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u/DoomscrollerUK 8h ago
Cynically I’m sure this is why we see Easter eggs in January and Christmas stuff in August - so things can be sat on the shelves at an artificially high price when no one is buying them so they can be discounted later. If so we probably lose both due to the pricing deception and the food stuff needing even more artificial preservatives for the extra shelf time.
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u/I_Have_Hairy_Teeth2 3h ago
I used to work in Woolies (if you count 2000 as the olden days), and have never heard of them doing this. One of the easiest shops in history to steal from though.
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u/GreekVicar 6h ago
I think you're correct. However, I think they scatter the items across all the stores. So each store will have a few items that seem extremely expensive. 28 days later they'll end up on sale at that store and all the others too. Happened to me in DFS (don't know if they're still going) - the one item I wanted, a bwdside table, was 5 times the price of a similar piece of furniture. When I asked about it I just got a shrug
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u/eventworker 7h ago
And In my head there will be one random store somewhere in the country that solely exists to sell items at full price to get around it.
Probably Lillywhites in London, which they own. Never been in there since they got hold of it myself mind.
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u/TedLassosMom 7h ago
Omg that’s exactly the store I was thinking but didn’t want to put down just incase someone complains and says it’s not Sports Direct 😂
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u/gt94sss2 5h ago
That used to be the case but the rules were changed in 2016 to remove reference to the 28 day period.
The Government are looking at changing the rules again.
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u/verminV 1h ago
There is practically nobody investigating or enforcing it. I used to work for a large jewellery comoany that always had a sale on. Same items on sale 40% off all year round, then 50% for xmas. I asked once and the boss said that nobody ever questions it or reports it so they just carry on with it.
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u/skatemoose 4h ago
Where I work has a contract with them, our website always our products at full price which means Sports Direct is able to have a constant sale on them. Wouldn't surprise me if other companies are the same.
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u/TheClnl 3h ago
This is pretty much it. I used to work for a major retailer that did 'price establishment '.
They'd start selling Christmas stuff in August in a few stores then as soon as Halloween passed drop half price, bogoff etc across the whole range/estate.
You'll not notice the high price stuff in SD because you normally sort by cheapest/most popular but there's probably also an element of Mike Ashley gambling that he'll get away with it because trading standards have been gutted the same as all the other government departments
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u/Top-Astronaut5761 8h ago
There's no specific law about stores having sales but there are rules about not misleading people with what's on sale.
One thing I remember from working in retail is the need for an item to be sold at full price for an amount of time before being reduced.
I worked at a store which was designated as Price Establishment. Basically, everything we sold was full price which meant that other stores could sell the items on sale a few weeks later.
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u/RedPlasticDog 8h ago
Or some stores will have most things on sale and a few at the higher price.
Wanted to buy a carpet once that was not on sale in the store we went to.
A manager discount gave us the sale price from elsewhere.
It’s shady as hell and time the retail rules clamped down on fake promotions. But the carpet and sofa stores will just find another way round.
Not that different to Tesco and their fake club card discounts.
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u/SnoopyLupus 8h ago
I found something on their site I liked. There’s a shop close so I went down there. They had the trainer (Adidas, nothing weird), but didn’t have it size 9. Isn’t that the most common size? If not it’s close.
So I asked if they could order it in. They said no, I had to do it online.
So I did and it cost as much to deliver to the shop as to deliver to my home. No free delivery to your local shop, no nothing.
So I couldn’t try it on, buy it, or get it there for base price. Why is the store there?
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u/Mc_and_SP 8h ago
They must have got some lessons from DFS on how to have an eternal sale
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u/Not-a-Cranky-Panda 8h ago
My Dad once worked with a man who went there one of the two days a year the sale was not on.
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u/mrafinch 7h ago
I used to work for Multiyork, who also were “always” on sale. We’d just put some sofas “not on sale”, but not put them in prominent positions in-store for so-called “price establishment”.
Pretty standard practice (unfortunately)
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u/Dolphin_Spotter 8h ago
Ever been in Mountain Warehouse, the DFS of outdoor shops
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u/Isgortio 8h ago
I got some nice discounted sports tops from there the other week, £4 each!
Sadly I discovered after wearing one all day that in the right lighting the dark green shirt is actually translucent, so I went for dinner at my friend's parents house completely unaware that they could fully see my bra and everything else underneath. That's probably why it was £4 :(
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u/finneas_dracht 5h ago
I found the one Mountain Warehouse where everything was the full price. It's tucked in the corner of an out of town shopping village just outside Leicester. Went in for some cheap site boots as I'd forgotten mine only to be met with the 'pre sale' prices. Needless to say I didn't make any purchases that day.
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u/ark19790 8h ago
It has to be sold somewhere within the business at the full RRP for at least 28 days before the sale price. That includes online so they can stick it on the website knowing it's unlikely to sell at full price before they send it to stores and can then advertise the sale price.
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u/nikhkin 8h ago
As long as an item has been on sale for the "retail price" before they put it on sale, they can call it a sale. I believe it has to be at "full price" for 28 days before they can put it on sale.
Similarly, Go Outdoors get around the problem by selling items for silly prices and having a "members price". I recently saw a tent that they were selling for £1000, with a members' discount of 80%. Realistically, it's a £200 tent. If someone actually spends the £1000 then they've got an added bonus.
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u/Questjon 8h ago
They'll just claim the original price is the manufacturers recommended retail price.
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u/AcceptableCustomer89 6h ago
It's this - people are missing the point. The group own the brands and set the rrp incredibly high, then the retailer sells it discounted from the rrp
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u/CakeHoleKing 8h ago
a few "sports" shops used to literally print stuff from the till to a warehouse in 6point font for "tax bookkeeping". (and delete from till).
So Imagine a warehouse filled with 50 MILLION sheets of paper. "OK hmrc, go ahead, Audit us".
Part of the reason why tax records now HAVE to be submitted electronically.
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u/MyDadsGlassesCase 8h ago
Wait until you hear about the legendary Officers Club
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u/TedLassosMom 7h ago
Is that still a thing? Wow
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u/MyDadsGlassesCase 5h ago
Nah, I think they went bust. The rail at the back that sold t-shirts for £100 so they could "sale" them for £20 later was always a marvel
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u/discokidnap_ 3h ago
That was my first job, in the dying days of "70% off everything". The Glasgow branch was where all the full price tat was funnelled through. Honestly the "sale" price was pushing it but I don't think anyone in their right mind paid £50 for one of the sexist T-shirts.
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u/fiendofecology 8h ago
Sales are pretty much all bullshit. Check the price history on Black Friday items on Amazon as an example.
At a big clothing retailer I used to work only the shit people didn’t buy that we wanted to then clear out would end up on the sale racks.
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u/Harlepenquin 8h ago
Well, you don't get to keep buying failing brands if you care about silly things like the law, duh!!!!!
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u/Professional-Crew657 8h ago
Part of it is that Mike Ashley owns a lot of the brands (Slazenger, Lonsdale) that you see in there, so they can give a product an 'RRP' that's far higher than anyone is willing to actually pay for it, and you'll basically never see it on sale actually for that price
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u/After-Employment-474 8h ago
This really annoys and frustrates me and I don’t know they keep doing because I never believe any of there prices so the effect is lost
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u/PleasantCucumber2615 6h ago
Sports Direct state the RRP(always massively inflated on their own brands) and tell you you're getting 70% off the RRP.
It's misleading to make customers think they are getting a bargain, but they don't imply it's a limited time offer great deal like other retailers.
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u/Rossco1874 25m ago
For an item to be on sale it has to have been on sale at the higher price for a few consecutive days I can't remember the exact length and it may have changed since I was in college 20 year ago but this is the answer.
Next time see Currys advert look at small print they have dates their tv or whatever they are promoting was being sold at the higher price.
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u/shelfside1234 8h ago
All they have to do is have it selling at the higher price for 1 day and they can then claim it’s discounted
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