IN last week’s edition I bemoaned the fact there were so many discounts and offers in our shops these days it was hard to determine what the genuine sale items were.

Since then it’s been revealed that a Tesco in Birmingham has been fined £300,000 for misleading its customers over punnets of strawberries and six high street furniture stores are being investigated over sale items which apparently weren’t such a great deal after all.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve never believed a dozen or so strawberries were actually worth £4 full price anyway, but that’s irrelevant.

Apparently, goods have to be sold at full price for at least 28 consecutive days to legitimately warrant a half-price sticker – or shops have to explicitly explain what the actual offer is.

While a fine of this nature is probably a drop in the ocean for a huge retail giant like Tesco, the damage to its reputation and the increase in cynicism from customers is probably more of a punishment.

And now The Office of Fair Trading has revealed that it found inflated ‘reference pricing’ in six national furniture stores.

The OFT said that in some cases, the stores had not sold a single product at the previous higher price.

Experts are encouraging consumers to challenge shops before they buy – to question how long the item was selling at full price and how many were sold, but in practice, how many of us are going to do that?

I was booking a couple of hotels online for my forthcoming holiday and the website was promoting 25 per cent savings.

However, unless I’d stayed there for the past few years and was familiar with the prices how on earth would I know if that discount was genuine or not?

Most consumers take retailers at their word and we deserve complete transparency when it comes to sale items.

In the meantime, I’m going to adopt a new mantra when it comes to spending my hard-earned cash... You only get what you pay for.