H.E. Minister of Commerce and Industry Dr. Tawfiq bin Fauzan Al-Rabiah has issued a decree prohibiting the announcement of the minimum prices without clarifying the maximum ones, such as using the phrase "Prices start from ...." which may delude the consumer of low prices, while the existing commodities prices are higher than the advertised ones.
This comes after the Ministry has received a large number of citizens' complaints on commercials offering the products with the highest specifications and the best options, mentioning only the minimum prices. This gives an impression of unreality and leads to issuing a decree for putting the minimum and maximum real prices on every commodity, such as "Prices start from (......) to (.....) ".
Such phrases are recently spread in the sales outlets, by offering a number of commodities in one place with a tag showing the lowest price of an item and a phrase reading "Prices start from …" while the consumer is not aware about the real price, only at the cashier, as well as many ads are spread about cars with low specifications and lower prices, at the same time putting pictures of cars with the highest specifications and that does not reflect the real price of what has been advertised.
MCI pointed out that the Commercial Data System had mentioned in its first and second articles that the price is considered a commercial statement and must be written in Arabic and conforming to reality, any violation may require the application of the penalty of the Commercial Data System, which may reach to a fine of SR (100,000) Riyal .
Besides, the Council of Minister decree No. 174 dated 27.05.1434 H gave MCI the right to apply the fines and penalties of the municipal violation, such as not putting the price tag on the offered items, which may reach to a fine of SR 5.000 for each item.
It is worth mentioning that this decision comes after MCI has carried out several awareness campaigns and inspection rounds, aiming at organizing the Saudi markets and to ensure compliance with the regulations and related decrees, examples of such campaigns are: “Prohibiting Service Charge in Restaurants”, "Do not Ask How Much" ,"We are Proud of our Language "," No Charges "," Energy Efficiency Label ", " Fuel Economy "and " Take the Rest".