Yesterday I needed to buy batteries for a toy that Santa made a mistake when he visited on Christmas Eve, silly Santa.

As it was St. Stephens Day I knew that there would be very few shops open but felt confident that the local petrol station would be open, so I drove to the village. On my way I noticed a ViVo convienence store open and as parking would easier I decided to go in. I located the batteries with the price of €5 per battery attached to it and said "that pricey" but I needed the batteries. I asked the girl for 2 batteries and as she scanned them through the Epos a price of €5.49 came up. I protested and said the price is €5 to which she voided the first transaction and charged me €10 for the two batteries. I was annoyed but went home, when I got home I noticed that the €5 sticker was covering the original price sticker of €4.35 (they did'nt even have the brains to remove the old one) 

So not only did the shop increase the price by 65c it attempted to extort another 49c on top. That's a total of €1.14 or 26.2% of extortion on top of the large margin that batteries would attract anyway. It never fails to amaze me that these so called business men and women appear to be more intent on short term gain as opposed to ensuring that customers will come back time and time again to help secure the future of their business. That ViVo has lost me forever as I will never use it again. Additionally we as customers need to pay more attention to what is going on when we buy goods as I have a feeling that this practise is not confined to Christmas.

Another thing why do batteries have best before dates now? the ones I bought had a 2013 date, but they'll be long dead before that.