Thirty shoppers in Cancún got an extra-special deal while shopping on the weekend during Mexico’s equivalent to Black Friday, a four-day shopping spree called Buen Fin. They bought plasma-screen televisions for just nine pesos.

The shoppers were at Telebodega on Sunday when they noticed that the price on a 55-inch flat-screen TV was only 8.99 pesos, or less than US 50 cents, and seized the opportunity.

The devices’ actual price was 1,000 times more — 8,999 pesos (US $445) — but a store employee entered a decimal point where there should have been a comma.

The sharp-eyed buyers did not budge even after the store manager tried to explain the mistake. Instead, they called Profeco, the federal consumer protection agency.

Its representatives acknowledged that the label on the TVs was incorrect, but insisted that the price displayed must be honored by the seller. Otherwise, Telebodega would be fined between 3,000 and 2 million pesos.

After a four-hour negotiation, the buyers went home with their 8.99-peso television sets, after settling for a smaller model, said a Profeco representative.

But things didn’t end so well for the employee who made the mistake.

He will have to pay over 230,000 pesos for it, that being the difference between the combined actual price of the sets and what the consumers paid for them.

Source: El Financiero (sp)