A news report on the TV this morning really had me in stitches. I was watching Sky News when they reported that 6 high street furniture stores are being investigated as it is believed they MAY have been using fake prices in their sales and discounts. WHAT A SURPRISE!

I am sure that this will come as a huge shock to many. How could some of our most trusted high street retailers dupe the buying public with such tactics? Could it really be possible that sofa and carpet retailers artificially raise prices in order to just lower them again, making it appear like they are displaying a fantastic deal? Surely not! I mean, you just wouldn’t get that in the double glazing industry…wait a minute…

All sarcasm aside, this investigation WILL find that retailers have raised their prices just to lower them again. How on earth can a two seater sofa suddenly drop from £1499 to £499? Who can just take £1k off the price of a sofa? The reality is is that retailers have been doing this for years and I am seriously surprised that it has taken this long to get an investigation going.

Carpetright and ScS are two of the six retailers up for investigation according to the BBC. It probably wouldn’t take much to work out the other four.

What this investigation does show is that regulators are now starting to uncover the misleading pricing practices of some our our biggest retail industries and our very own should be taking note. All it takes is a few anonymous letters or hints to the pricing regulators to ask to look into the industry and it could really open a rather large can of worms. Especially for the national companies in our industry.

I really am looking forward to the final outcome of this investigation. Hopefully it will highlight exactly how these “sales” and “discounts” have been engineered falsely to dupe the buying public out there.