I am in the grip of some kind of zombipocalypse fervour. This all came about when I read on savygamer.co.uk that Tesco Entertainment, which is the media mail order arm of Britain’s largest supermarket, were offering Left 4 Dead 2 on Xbox for a mere £15 ($25) with free delivery. This was then followed up by Steam’s Black Friday/Cyber Monday extravaganza during which the original Left 4 Dead cost a mere £6.50 ($10), so I snapped that up too. As if this tasty brainathon couldn’t get any more exciting, Threadless had their Black Friday sale, where all tees were £5.50 ($9), which meant I could pick up this gem among a few others.



So for less than £30 spent a whole host of zombie butchering mayhem awaited. However, it didn’t exactly pan out that way as you could probably imagine, as Tesco realised that selling a brand new game for £15 was a wild and scurrilous mistake. In days gone by a witless online retailer may have simply honoured the deal rather than upset those concerned, but with the advent of twitter and blogs such as savygamer, they must have had thousands of orders at this price.

So I got an email saying that my order had been cancelled and here was a £2 voucher for my inconvenience. I’d already been playing L4D on the PC for 24 hours by this point, such is the convenience of digital distribution. Steam didn’t clock me after the fact to say, “oooh, £6.50, what were we thinking? The boy who enters the prices is going to get quite the whipping… it should have read £25! £2 off instead sound good?” and then delete my rights to play it (grrr, DRM).



It’s a bit of a no brainer (no pun intended) for Tesco to pull the plug on all those orders. Contrary to popular myth, a retailer in England and Wales is not obliged to sell mispriced goods at the price advertised. Making a mistake on the price of an item does not amount to misrepresentation, and any retailer worth his highstreet salt would argue that prices are not an offer of sale, which you accept when you use the checkout, thereby creating a contract , but rather it is an ‘invitation to treat’.

Very simply, a contract exists only when there is offer and acceptance. Someone may offer to sell you something, and you accept by agreeing to buy it. Conversely, if you offer to buy something, the contract is formed when the seller accepts your offer. An invitation to treat is simply fancy legal speak for a seller making his product and price known to the buyer so that the buyer can be the one to make an offer.

The other thing to bear in mind is that online retailers are wholly automated, so even if the price is wrong, simply checking out will result in a conformation of the order, which would be an acceptance in any other circumstances and a contract would then exist. However, retailers are wise to this and know full well that while a contract almost certainly exists at this point, they can add terms to that contract that favour their rights over yours at the point of confirmation. When you first checkout for the first time, many retailers will have you check a box that says that you agree to the terms and conditions of the sale, and this means that once you complete the purchase those terms and conditions are incorporated into the contract and are binding on both parties.

So where does that leave me and L4D2? Tesco were kind enough to have a clear and concise terms and conditions displayed on their website: “If, by mistake, we have under priced a product, we will not be liable to supply that product to you at the stated price, provided that we notify you before we despatch the product to you. In those circumstances, we will notify the correct price to you so you can decide whether or not you wish to order the product at that price.”

Yes, it’s annoying, yes it would have been nice for Tesco to automatically dispatch my copy before they realised the error, but I can understand why they backtracked very quickly. I won’t be utilizing my £2 voucher, thus saving the Big-T even more money on their damage limitation, mainly because £35 for the full-price game isn’t much of a bargain. I’ll just keep an eye out on savygamer.com and pick it up when it hits the far more reasonable £20-£25 mark. I’ve got plenty to be getting on with in the meantime, not least my £6.50 copy of L4D and a suitable tshirt to wear whilst playing it…

Postscript. Checking the twitterstream, it appears that some people did indeed get the £15 price honoured. Lucky them.