The Hut are still very dishonest
Surprise surprise, after issuing a coupon for 10% off everything at midday today, what do you think The Hut did next?
Of course, they increased the prices of lots of items so that they are more expensive than they were before, even with the coupon applied. It’s pretty underhanded, but they have prior form.
Just Cause 2 on 360/PS3 was £17.93 before the coupon was around. Now they jacked the price up to £23.93 (or £21.54 with the coupon). It’s a similar story for No More Heroes 2, Fight Night Round 4, Battlefield: Bad Company 2, 2,100 MS points and no doubt more of the thousands of items in their catalogue that I haven’t noticed.
Last time that this happened, I gave them the benefit of the doubt and asked them for their take on it. They never gave me a satisfactory answer, and gradually stopped responding to my emails. This time I went straight to trading standards.
After explaining the story so far, trading standards said “We are going to investigate this report of potentially missleading pricing and advertising, and this is a potentially criminal issue”.
I’ll speak to them again in a few weeks time to see how the investigation is going. I’ll let you know how it develops.
Nice work Lewie.
Are you after Anne Robinson’s job on Watchdog?
Good on yer, Lew. Fight the good fight.
You fucking let them have it, matey, it’s an utterly bastard move from them.
Spreading the word to my literally tens of followers. It’s just not right. It’s either a sale, or it isn’t.
Good job man, this obviously is likely affecting all their stock and sales, which is a rather big issue when a “sale” appears! I hate the twofacedness of this.
Fantastic Lewie, you’re a star.
+1, same as above.
You might want to remove the link to TheHut from the list of retailers over there — >
No, just add the annotation “dishonest scumbags”. Removing it entirely means that someone might stumble across it on their own – the warning’ll stick in their mind.
Thank you Lewie for fighting the good fight for us! I’m glad Trading Standards are looking into this. Hopefully we’ll hear some good news soon.
I never have, and never will, use the Hut to buy from. This is worse practice than places that state they’re on sale and “sale ends soon”, but they’re always on sale regardless (hint: if you’re on sale forever, then those are your normal prices!).
I would rather buy from Game than deal with the Hut.
I would rather buy from Game and give the guy behind the counter a tip than deal with the Hut.
Quick, someone call the Big Bad Wolf!
A hut needs some blowin’, yarr.
Either you’re very naive, or you’ve got something against TheHut. Lots of companies do this all the time. Have you never noticed how Disney DVDs can usually be bought for £7/£8, until they come to offer one of their fantastic BOGOF deals, at which time they all revert back to their RRP of £15-odd. Are you going to report Disney to Trading Standards as well??
“what do you have against hitler I mean stalin killed loads of people too why don’t you have a go at him!”
OK, think I’ll go somewhere else and talk to some grown-ups. Bye
@Robin:
It’s a perfectly valid point. Phrased differently, someone breaking the law does not excuse someone else breaking the law in the same way. Obviously, getting both deal with is optimal. I fail to see how dealing with neither is the next most optimal solution.
Further more, this is a GAMING blog, not a DVD or Disney blog. So one issue is more likely to be noticed than the other
Since it was not apparently obvious, The Hut have done this before. Lewie is having a go at them for it because cheap games are the subject of his blog – Disney are outside the scope of SavyGamer, whereas The Hut are exactly the sort of company Lewie posts about. They let him know about upcoming discounts (via the usual spam), he goes through the site looking for nice prices on games, and posts a list in advance… and the day comes, and suddenly all the prices have gone up. He tries to get some answers, and they pretty much ignore him…
And now they’ve done it again.
He does have something against The Hut – their behaviour. Should he just let them off and ignore the fact that they’re ripping people off because they’ve done it before and other companies do it too? Seriously?
Fair enough, but I think the the genocide analogy was taking it a touch too far! And I still take issue with singling out TheHut and labelling them “very dishonest”, when all they’re doing is employing a marketing tactic used across the industry
If and when you see another games retailer do the same thing, or something similar, please let me know and I will name and shame them also.
An illegal marketing tactic. That’s the point.
It’s a supposed ‘special offer’ that deliberately misleads consumers into spending more than they have to. The misleading part is what makes it illegal under UK law.
Of course it was taking it too far – an utterly ridiculous criticism calls for an utterly ridiculous response.
Nice one … keep up the pressure …
I was tempted by a few items, but they can swivel if this is the way they choose to run their company.
Boosting the price of your items so they end up costing just as much as before after you apply an offer is one thing, making the items costs more than they were before the offer ? crazy!
Sock it to them dude!
Well it’s enough to convince me to never buy anything from the Hut at any time in the future, even if they were the cheapest retailer for something I was after.
I ran a full scan of The Hut to find out all the increases – 43 in total (there might be a few more, but those are the ones our scanner picked up): http://bit.ly/9zvkhb
(You can remove the link/comment if you like, just wanted to pass on the info.)
Well the official Rock Band drums are now a good £8 cheaper on TheHut than they were this time last week, and with the extra 10% off they come in at £8.94, so I’m happy 🙂
Just imagine what you could accomplish in life if you actually spent your time doing something important.
You mean instead of posting messages on a games blog, for instance?
Saving hundreds, if not thousands of people lots of money, allowing them to enjoy more entertainment than they could otherwise is more important than what the rest of us are doing. Go find a bridge or something.
Anything new on this?
I’ve let them know I’m happy to interview then for their side of the story.
I doubt I’ll ever use The Hut again…
I was after a copy of Command & Conquer: Kane’s Wrath PC for ages which is now advertised at £4.93. Having been out for a couple of years I wanted to get it for as little as possible and eBay didn’t seem to yield any auction bargains.
So when I had an email from The Hut with a £1 off code I bought it from them.
What they don’t tell (or even show) you is that this is “EA Classics” budget version with a bright yellow cover. Ok, I admit it – I detest budget covers. Maybe I’m a bit retentive or a bit OCD. I like my games to have the original cover as nature intended and if I knew that was what they were selling I would never have bought it…