Carrefour store accused of pricing fraud

The local government in North China's Shanxi province is investigating a Carrefour SA store that has been accused of pricing fraud.

Song Jianhu, director of the price supervision division of the Taiyuan price administration bureau, said on Monday that a Carrefour store in Changfeng Street was accused of cheating customers with mislabeled price tags.

Store officials said the items were mislabeled because salespeople forgot to change the price tags after a recent sales promotion ended.

The price administration bureau received consumers' complaints this month that the price tags on packages of Cola Cao, a chocolate cereal bar, listed 11.9 yuan ($1.91), but customers were charged 14.8 yuan at checkout, Song said.

The bureau staff investingated at the Carrefour store on Thursday and Friday and found that the complaints were true, he said.

Song said he has submitted a report to the bureau's case-hearing commission, which will decide the store's punishment.

"The most serious penalty for this kind of price fraud is a 500,000 yuan fine," he said on Monday. "It depends on the amount of the illegal income obtained."

Qiao Xudong, the public relations manager at the Carrefour store, said the store is cooperating with investigators. The lower price tags were mistakenly left on the Cola Cao packages after a sales promotion that began more than a week ago and had ended, he said.

"We are not trying to cheat customers," he said on Monday. "It's an occasional mistake caused by management flaws, not price fraud."

The store changed the price tags back to 14.8 yuan after the investigation, he said.

"We don't want to see this happen either, and we are going to improve our management to avoid such mistakes," he said.

Lu Haifeng, 35, a Taiyuan resident, said the fraud made him distrust the store.

"I buy almost all my daily stuff at the Carrefour store, and I am going to check my receipts to make sure that nothing I bought had wrong prices," he said.

It's not the first time Carrefour has been investigated by the government.

The government of Wuhan, capital of Central China's Hubei province, fined the city's six Carrefour stores 450,000 yuan for faking discounts to promote cookware and schoolbags on June 17, Changjiang Times reported.

A Carrefour store in Zhengzhou, capital of Henan province, was found to be selling expired meat, and it also mislabeled ordinary chicken as free-range ones to sell at higher prices, China Central Television reported on March 15.