Mr Price is not right

<p>On Thursday the 16th of June 2016 I went to Mr Price in Kenilworth Centre to purchase a Melton Jacket for my son. They had burgundy and one navy jacket available at R299.99 each. My wife spoke to an assistant named Alwie to see for availability of a size small in the navy colour as they never had that size in stock. Alwie checked his system and saw that Mr Price in Blue Route had stock available. He made contact with the store and told the person whom he spoke to that we were on our way to the store. They were requested to put the jacket aside and he told us to go to the cashier’s desk to get the jacket.</p> <p>When we got to Mr Price Blue Route, nobody had any idea of the jacket that they were supposed to hold for us. I got my son to get a jacket off the rail so that they could get an idea of which jacket we were looking for. When he brought the jacket, the price on the jacket was R349.99. The lady who assisted us was Gizelle. I queried the price of the jacket as the jackets in the Kenilworth branch was R299.99. She then said that the price of the jacket was incorrect. The price is actually R369.99.</p> <p>We went to the rail were the jackets were and I saw that they had the burgundy jackets for R249.99 as well as R299.99. She then said that the price of the burgundy jackets was R249.99 and pulled the price off the one labelled R299.99.</p> <p>As I was checking the prices of the navy jackets, Gizelle went to call the Kenilworth store. After about 10 minutes we went to find here and she said that the price of the navy jacket was R369.99 and not R299.99. The burgundy stock was old stock and was marked down. I asked her if she spoke to Alwie at the Kenilworth branch and she said that she knows that there is no person by that name working there. I then told her to give me the number for the store so that I could call them from my cell phone. She said that they did not have the number as they use their internal numbers. She then called the Kenilworth store and was miraculously able to speak to Alwie “who she knew never worked at the Kenilworth branch”. After she had spoken to Alwie, she called me over to speak to him and he told me that the navy jacket was R369.99, as it was new stock. When I asked him why the price on the jacket, as well as the computer was not listed as R369.99 when he checked while we were in the store, he said that the listing that he looked at was of last year, so those prices were old prices. The navy jacket that they had was a return from a customer and it was the only one left, so it was marked at R299.99. He apologised for not letting us know what the correct price was.</p> <p>When I took the jacket (that my son took off the rail when we got to the store) from Gizelle, I saw that she had torn off the price of R349.99. Her response to me was that the prices were wrong and they now had to change the prices to R369.99.</p> <p>It is disgusting that a retailer such as Mr Price has no policy in place were it comes to incorrectly priced items. The fact that Mr Price staff can just change prices of items in your hands is ridiculous. The fact that they have people who have erroneously marked items are not my concern. An item in one store should be the same as an item in another store, especially when I, as the customer, take the time to drive from one store to another after the stores are in contact with each other, as was in my case. The fact that prices vary from R249.99 to R369.99 for the same item is absolutely unconscionable for a retailer of this size. I do feel that Mr Price needs to train their staff to be more professional in dealing with customers and in handling incorrect pricing of merchandise.</p>