Czechs crack down on retailer discounts

The Czech Trade Inspection Authority (COI) will be cracking down on retailers who trick consumers into thinking they're buying goods at a discount. The daily Pravo writes that nearly half of all goods bought in the Czech Republic were listed as being on sale, a tendency retailers are finding ways to exploit. The most common is to stick on a price that's listed as a substantial percentage discount without providing the original price. "The discount should be taken from the price at which the item was actually being sold at, not taken from the recommended consumer price given by the producer," said COI's spokesman Jiří Frohlich. The consumer test organization dTest welcomes the new initiative. "The implementation of the rules for calculating sales is definitely positive," dTest's legal director Lukáš Zelený told Pravo. "On the Czech market we regularly see retailers calculating prices from mysterious original prices for goods that might never even have been sold."