It’s a simple answer: no.

Even on Gründonnerstag (Maundy Thursday) many shops are required to shut earlier than usual, with supermarkets that usually stay open until 9pm, 10pm or even midnight on other days closing their doors at 8pm and not opening again until Saturday morning.

And when they do open there will be a last-minute rush for Osterhasen and generally a lot of people stocking up before everything shuts again for another two days.

With even the bakeries closed on Good Friday, the petrol stations will be doing a good trade and are probably the best place to go if you run out of anything over the weekend.

Some other posts on this topic that you might like to read:

• Why are there no lorries on the roads on Good Friday?
• Easter Pack 1
• Ostern

So, as in the English equivalent, you might find that an offer is particularly popular and goes out of stock.

However, this being Germany there are rules on how long a product has to be “in stock” for a shop to be able to claim this, so that they do not purposely have very few available and just use the offer to get people to enter the store.  In the event that they do run out without a certain amount of time, they have to offer the consumers who want to take advantage of it the chance to receive the product later at the advertised price.

Now the rule is pretty complicated, and I won’t go into detail here.  In fact, I can just about remember the details of one-week offers, but any others I would have to look up myself.

But I could have done with knowing the rules in Karstadt in Bad Homburg today.  Not that it would have helped me much, but here is what happened anyway:

I received a voucher in the post from Karstadt for a 200g chocolate Osterhase (Easter Bunny) if I spent 50 Euros in the store.  But not just any Osterhase, there were offering me a Lindt Goldhase.

That is, one of these:

Lindt is a Swiss chocolate company and Goldhase is one of their most well-known products – the product form is even a registered 3D trademark.  The 200g version is worth about 5 Euros.

So today when I actually did spend 50 Euros in Karstadt, I was looking forward to bringing one home with me.

However the cashier popped something that was not goldfoil-wrapped into the carrier bag and it didn’t look quite right.  So I took it back out again, and it was a 50g chocolate Osterhase from a company in Bavaria.

I questioned this with the cashier, but all she could say was “that’s all I have”, before finally admitting that the store had run out of Lindt Goldhasen.

Now, I’m not going to make a big fuss about a chocolate bunny rabbit, and I do not know if is OK to run out this early (the offer runs until Easter Saturday), but what I do object to is the fact that Karstadt are still selling the Lindt version in the same store.

So what has really happened is that they have run out of the giveaway stock.

I wonder if they are allowed to do that?  Perhaps I should call the Verbraucherzentrale on Monday…

Some other posts on this topic that you might like to read:

• Burger King and ADAC extend their offer by a further year
• Take a tour of the Schwebebad at the Hessentag
• 3 German Phrases you probably don’t know

Q: When is a price not a price?

A: When it’s a “Displaypreis”

What sounds like a bad joke actually happened to me at a local supermarket last week – the very simple case of when the price on the shelf does not match the price in the computer.

Of course, this being Germany there is a law to govern such things and it is called the Preisangabenverordnung and acts in a similar way to the Sale of Goods act in the UK.  As I understand it, you cannot display a price on the shelf and then ask for a higher one at the till.

And yet it happens and I am usually more than willing to point this out and insist on paying the price that was on display.

Over the years I have experienced various answers.  Most supermarkets will just check that I am right and charge me the lower price, although I remember taking one employee to a shelf to show that the price in the computer was off by several Deutschmarks, only for them to remove the sign in question and say “so, now it’s not anymore” and insist on the higher price.

I have also been in supermarkets when the prices have been raised during the course of the day, so that the price on the shelf changed after I took something off it!

But the absolute winner in excuses was the one last week.  The Displaypreis.

You see, the article in question was actually available in two places in the same aisle – at different prices.  I took mine from the lower priced area and the cashier wanted to charge me the higher price.  So I queried it, and was told that the price was correct.  The lower price was a Displaypreis.

So what is a Displaypreis? I was sent back to the department for an explanation.

It turned out that the item was available either on a normal shelf at the normal price, or at the second location as part of a “display”.  Although both items carried the same bar codes for the consumer, the number to order the items individually was different to the number to order a palette at a time – for the display.  To make life easier for the staff, someone had decided to leave the price showing the palette order number of the shelf, even though the price itself was no longer valid.

And there was no way that this employee was going to give in, despite me telling him that it was even worse than making a mistake – he was deliberately leaving the wrong price on the shelf.  He even went as far as to forbid me taking a photo of his wrong price with my mobile phone.

It was only when I threatened to call the town hall the next day and report the shop to the relevant authority for unfair trading, that he decided to call the duty manager… who took one look at the sign, ordered him to remove it, and proceeded to refund what I had effectively been overcharged.

It was only a small amount, but it was a moral victory.  After all, how many other people would have fallen for it, if it had remained on display?

Some other posts on this topic that you might like to read:

• A Schultüte from the Supermarket
• Same procedure as last year?
• Lidl in the news

Not only is the cone filled with healthy fruit and useful things such as a timetable to fill out and a ruler, but the promotion was well organised.

Although we had received a voucher in advance, we went early to make sure that our daughter did not miss out.  Excepting to find a large display – possibly with none left by the time we got there, we were pleasantly surprised to find that they were being kept out of public view and were only being issued on production of the voucher.

So even if this isn’t the cone that will be going with her to school next week, it was a nice thing for them to do and really brought home the fact, that there are only a few days left to go.

Thank you Rewe – and well done!

Our daughter and her school cone at the supermarket

Some other posts on this topic that you might like to read:

• The first day at School
• The sad story of the “Displaypreis”
• Introducing the “KinderCone”

The Woolworth’s chain was very much in the news in the run up to Christmas in the UK. Now, it seems, it is the turn of the German Woolworth’s to enter the world of financial turmoil. Last week it was announced that they had registered the company as insolvency – a step that is similar to filing for bankruptcy, whilst at the same time giving them a chance to carry on trading under strict conditions in the hope of finding a solution to their problems.

My first visit to a German branch of Woolworth’s (technically they are called just “Woolworth”) was in Kleve, near the Dutch border, and during my first years in Germany I was a frequent visitor to the store in Bad Homburg. However, in recent years I have rarely gone there except to buy things that I have not been able to get anywhere else. Indeed, the location at the top end of the Louisenstrasse – the main pedestrian area – means that it is somewhat off the beaten track if you are only in the town centre for a short time.

Possibly there lies the problem. Much of the media criticised the UK company as being modern enough, saying that the stores had not moved with the times. The German media has been making the same sort of claims this week, and yet the two companies were completely separate entities.

Whilst the Woolworths Group PLC in the UK had already split from the main US company in 1982, it took until 1998 for the German “DWW Deutsche Woolworth GmbH & Co. OHG” to follow suit. Since then the German company has modernised the cash desks and introduced new store concepts.

But this, it sadly seems, was just not enough.

Some other posts on this topic that you might like to read:

• Circus Renz Manege
• Planet Germany
• The White Tower of Bad Homburg