Consumer Protection: An end to messy sales
Sales should no longer be a booby trap to sell poor quality or outdated products or to update prices. The provisions of the bill which has just been submitted to the General Secretariat of the Government by the Ministry of Industry and Trade include a tighter regulatory framework governing sales which often are characterized by abuses intended to deceive customers.
Thus, article 53 distinguishes between sales, clearance of goods, and promotional offers. The first operation consists in sales that are necessarily preceded by an advertising campaign and announcements. The purpose of the sales is to speed up the sale of products and items in stock by lowering prices. For its part, clearance is an operation that consists of selling items at a reduced price for one of the following reasons: permanent closure of a store, change of activity, temporary cessation of activity, or change in the conditions of operation (relocation of a shop, etc.) As for promotional offers, they aim to increase sales by means of lower prices.
Merchants are required to display the products or goods to which the reduction of price relates, the new price and the old price which must be crossed out, as well as the start and end of the operation. The new regulations introduced by the bill provide for the organization of sales during two periods of at least two weeks each, or at most two months. Implementing decrees will have to set the dates of the sales periods. Promotional offers may be held for a maximum of four weeks, spread over the year as the merchant wishes.
It goes without saying that no date can be set for clearance sales which occur in the case, for example, of the closure of a business or a change of activity. Nonetheless, a clearance sale will have to be the subject of a prior declaration to the authority concerned according to a procedure which remains to be defined by regulatory means but the duration of this type of sale will already be limited by law to two months.
The other point which was not provided for by the bill concerns a very common practice which consists in the display of two prices, the highest of which is crossed out, to make customers believe in a price drop. One just needs to check the prices practiced by the competition to realize that the difference in price does not often exceed a few dozen dirhams. Normally, consumer protection associations intervene in this type of case, but civil society does not often have recourse to these associations.
Hassan EL ARIF
