Tēnā koe Jon,

I write in response to your letter dated 7 March 2023. I would like to thank you for raising these issues with me on behalf of your members and for giving me an opportunity to respond.

At Countdown we understand the role the weekly shop plays in the lives of Kiwi families, especially with the cost of living pressures we are currently facing. We know our customers can choose where they shop, and we are determined to keep grocery prices as affordable as we can and to provide the best possible shopping experience.

We also know that we need to take great care to make sure that all of the tickets in our stores are accurate. All of our team members do their very best to achieve this. However, our supermarkets are very busy and we have thousands of products on special at any time. This means that we are putting up and taking down a significant number of tickets in our stores each week.

We have robust systems and processes in place to make sure that our tickets are accurate and we have dedicated “pricing integrity” teams in our stores, who are responsible for updating tickets and for checking they remain correct.

In the last year, we have made further improvements to our pricing integrity systems and processes following the feedback we received during the course of the Commerce Commission’s Retail Grocery Sector Market Study. These improvements include rolling out electronic shelf labels, which are now in 30 of our stores and will be in a further 60 of our stores by the end of this year.

Despite all of this, sometimes our processes and systems fall down and errors do occur. When they do, make sure we tell them straight away and, when a customer has been impacted, we put things right through a clear and comprehensive refund policy. Under this policy, if the price we charge for a product is higher than the price shown on the ticket, we provide a refund and the customer can keep the product free of charge.

Your statement that most of the examples of errors shared with you come from Countdown is very concerning to me. It is simply not good enough for our customers to see incorrect ticketing in our stores. For this reason I have asked my team to prioritise further actions on this, these are outlined below:

• Reminded all team members working in our stores of the importance of ensuring that all of our tickets are accurate.
• Reminded all team members working in our stores about our refund policy and the importance of applying it.
• Reminded our customer care team members of the importance of promptly escalating any ticketing issues so we can investigate and resolve them quickly. We will also be introducing a new feedback category that allows us to better track our progress on pricing integrity.
• Commissioned an internal review of our in store ticketing systems and processes to see whether there are any changes we could make to further reduce the risk of errors occurring.
  I know that price is one of the most important considerations for customers shopping in our stores, and we need to make sure that the tickets they see are accurate and reflect the price they will be charged at checkout. The examples you have sent show that we have not always met this expectation, but I hope this response gives you and our customers confidence that we take this matter seriously and we are taking action to make it right.

Nāku noa, Spencer Sonn (Managing Director, Woolworths New Zealand)