The deadline has become almost unavoidable for consumers wishing to save money as the holidays approach. “Black Friday”, or “Black Friday” in French, a commercial tradition imported from the United States, opens the Christmas shopping period with massive reductions in stores during the last weekend of November. But this also comes with its share of unfair practices.
The European Commission published, on Monday 19 December, the results of checks carried out during the market transaction. A control deployed, in collaboration with thirteen national authorities, to check how merchants present their discounts. After analyzing 16,000 product references on 176 online sales sites, the European authority discovered that 43% of the websites checked are in violation of European regulations.
To respond to the problem of false discounts displayed by certain brands, the European Union has laid down rules. And the “Omnibus” directive, applied in France since May, toughens the sanctions.
Protect consumers
Thus, when they announce a discount, merchants must take as a reference the lowest price applied to the product over the last thirty days, and display it. Companies that do not comply with this rule are liable to penalties of up to “two years’ imprisonment and a fine of 300,000 euros”precise le site Service public. While more than half of the products checked this year had a discount for “Black Friday”, 23% of these promotions did not comply with this legal provision.
The services of the European Commission used artificial intelligence to carry out their study. The tool developed at the European level has enabled local entities to closely monitor the fluctuations of the prices displayed during the thirty days preceding “Black Friday” for the sites active on their territory.
National authorities can now contact offending merchant sites to ask them to change their practice and apply the law in force. They can also impose fines if these unfair commercial practices are not corrected.
Inflated prices
For the Federal Union of Consumers-Que Choisir (UCF-Que Choisir), these methods are not “not a surprise”. “We also denounced the bad practices of certain merchants on the occasion of the last “Black Friday””she reacts on her site, adding that these offenses do not “represented only a visible part of a much larger phenomenon”. The association points out the limits of the “Omnibus” directive in terms of consumer protection.
In an article published on November 24, UFC-Que Choisir showed how several brands circumvented the regulations by inflating the price of certain items a month before the “Black Friday” deadline, in order to announce greater discounts. The association stresses the extent to which it is now « difficile » from “to get an idea of the normal price of an item”. A far from reassuring observation as the launch of the winter sales approaches on January 11, 2023.