A video filmed at a Pultora supermarket in Prague’s Žižkov district shows row after row of electronic shelf labels displaying the same price: 1 koruna (about €0.04). The fault hit 19,300 labels across 23 stores on Sunday, 27 September, and lasted 19 minutes before the retailer halted sales.
By Monday morning, the clip had passed 4.7 million views. Pultora said its tills processed 13,804 items at the displayed price before staff shut down affected checkouts; the company estimates those goods would normally have cost 2.7 million koruna (about €108,000). It says customers will not be asked to pay the difference.
How one price spread
A technical notice published by Pultora on Sunday traced the fault to a software update that connected checkout systems with new supplier price-floor rules. A mapping error sent a test value of 1 koruna from the rules database into the live selling-price field for affected products, then synchronised it to shelf labels and tills.
“We watched 19,300 prices become one price before anyone could stop the second sync,” said Alex E. Wójcik, Pultora’s technology director. He said the company stopped sales in the affected branches, disconnected the price service and began checking whether the same update had reached any other systems.
We watched 19,300 prices become one price before anyone could stop the second sync.
Alex E. Wójcik, Pultora technology director
Pultora’s staff reopened the stores gradually on Sunday after checking labels against the central product database. The company said it would honour completed purchases, and would refund customers who were charged more than the label showed during the fault. No customers were injured, but the outage left queues at several branches and delayed online grocery orders.
Price floors under review
The episode has drawn attention to supplier price floors: contractual limits intended to prevent a retailer from selling certain goods below an agreed amount. The Czech competition authority said it would seek information from Pultora and other retailers on how such rules are stored and applied. It did not say that the pricing arrangements themselves had broken competition law.
Patricia Zorić, a retail-systems specialist who advises Czech shop operators, said the failure was unusual because the same bad value reached both the labels and the checkout software. “A floor is a warning boundary, not a price to show a customer,” she said. “The system should have rejected that value before it reached the stores.”
Pultora said it had restored the previous software version and would require a second approval before future updates change live prices. The company has not given a date for completing a full audit. Its notice said the affected system held more than 600,000 product-price records, but the one-crown value reached only products covered by the newly imported rules.
