About half of the prices quoted were “increased on Sunday» compared to Saturday afternoon. STEPHANE MAHE / REUTERS
With increases of up to 36%, the brand practiced “dynamic pricing”.
The Casino brands, in particular the Casino Hyper Frais hypermarkets (formerly Géant), assured on Friday that they had given up the “dynamic pricing on Sunday“, in other words to a price increase on the shelves, revealed by consumer expert Olivier Dauvers. “The Casino brands, on the strength of all their initiatives in favor of purchasing power, decided to no longer apply dynamic pricing on Sundays at the end of January“, indicated the communication of the sign in a written statement.
In the middle of the week, Olivier Dauvers had published on his blog “Le Web Grande Consoprice statements in five hypermarkets under the Casino brand, from which it emerged that approximately half of the prices recorded were “increased on Sunday» compared to Saturday afternoon. He took the example of four Danette pistachio creams going from 2 euros 10 on Saturday afternoon to 2 euros 85 on Sunday morning, ie a price increase of 36%. Overall, he identified a “very homogeneous increase, about 15%».
«Since December 2018, the Casino brands have introduced a service, unprecedented at the time, with Sunday opening all day“, recalled Friday the communication of these signs. “At the time, this service, which provides additional comfort to the consumer, was accompanied by an experiment aimed at applying a minor price variation to the products, exclusively on Sundays.“. The revelation of this dynamic pricing, which recalls for example the price of plane or TGV tickets, has been the subject of many comments, in a context of high inflation where consumers are very sensitive to the price of the products they buy.
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On Twitter, the editor of the specialist magazine LSA Yves Puget recalled that the practice was “legal“, that it was a “basic practice in e-commerce“, wondering if we were going”towards the end of the single price», with a variation depending on the days or store formats. For its part, the blog specializing in the news of consumer products Marketing PGC estimated that Casino, the group that owns many brands (Monoprix, Franprix, Naturalia or the e-merchant CDiscount) had “broke a taboo“, which the “distribution sector can be proud“, but while making “the explosive subject with the general public».
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