Tesco weighs in
THE manager of Tesco's store in Sunder- land is living dangerously. The police around there are red-hot. Only the other day they swooped on a market trader who was weighing out his stock in pounds and ounces, and took his scales into custody. Now Tesco is going back to these obsolete units of measurement, on the extraordinary grounds that they were what its customers understood and wanted. We can't have that, can we? It was probably true of the market-trader's customers, and a fat lot of good it did them. Tesco has been advised that so long as it shows the metric weights on its packets in sufficiently large letters, it can show pounds and ounces, too, and the law will be helpless. It is the act of weighing that constitutes a criminal offence. This is all part of the government's campaign to save us from being ripped off by supermar- kets. For two years they have been picked over by the Competition Commission, though to the untrained eye they seem to be competing like fury. That is what Tesco is doing now. No wonder the police are on stand-by.
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