Before you buy, get that wafer pack weighed!

The next time you buy Lays chips, you are better warned to check if you are getting your money’s worth in weight. For a consumer court in the state has penalised PepsiCo Rs50,000 for selling underweight packages of potato chips. The money is to be deposited with the Consumer Welfare Fund of India.

An alert customer, Krishna Kumar Bajaj had bought a packet of Lays Tangy Twist potato chips from a provision store in Thaltej on June 28, 2010. Suspicious of its weight, Bajaj weighed the sealed packet and found it to be measuring just 8gm against the 30gm printed on the packet.

He then wrote to the company two times, and in the second instance the company in its reply accepted that the packet was underweight and offered a gift hamper to Bajaj which he refused.
Bajaj then approached Consumer Education and Research Society (CERS) which took the matter to the Consumer Disputes Redressal Forum after it received several unsatisfactory responses from the company.

When the case came up for hearing, the company argued that the complaint should not be entertained as Bajaj could not produce a bill for the purchase of the packet.

However, the court observed that, “As PepsiCo couldn’t deny that the packet bought by Bajaj was their product, the argument of his not having a bill and, therefore, his not being a consumer under the Consumer Protection Act was overruled.”

The court also asked the company to pay Bajaj Rs5,000 in mental agony and Rs2,000 by way of litigation cost. The court, while ruling in favour of Bajaj, commented that if PepsiCo claimed to be an international company, then such negligence was not acceptable.

“While just one packet was randomly discovered to be underweight by an alert consumer, a simple calculation indicates that the company can earn an extra profit of around Rs2.75 lakh if the entire production of 36,700 packets under the batch mentioned on the packet is sold underweight,” said Pritee Shah, editor of consumer magazine Insight.

“If PepsiCo stands to gain Rs2,75,250 from underweight delivery in one single product in one single batch of one particular manufacturing plant, the implications of it happening more often are simply huge and that too at the cost of consumers,” said CERS in a release.

“It is not a matter of few rupees. I also suspected that it was not a case of just one packet being underweight. It was injustice and I refused to put up with it and hence took the matter to the consumer forum,” said Bajaj.