A now-viral photo showing Dasani water being sold for $43 a case at a Houston Best Buy was “a big mistake,” the company said Tuesday.
A photo taken by Houston resident John McGovern has made the rounds on social media amid reports of price gouging in the wake of Hurricane Harvey.
Mr. McGovern told journalist Ken Klippenstein that the Best Buy on Highway 290 in the Houston suburb of Cypress was “taking advantage of people in need” for overpricing cases of bottled water.
A photo tweeted by Mr. Klippenstein showed Dasani 24-packs on sale for $42.96 and a “limited supply” of Smartwater 12-packs for $29.98.
Best Buy told CNBC that it does not sell water by the case and that employees tried to remedy the situation by pricing the cases by multiplying the price for a single bottle.
“This was a big mistake on the part of a few employees at one store on Friday,” a company spokesman said in a statement. “As a company we are focused on helping, not hurting affected people. We’re sorry and it won’t happen again. Not as an excuse but as an explanation, we don’t typically sell cases of water. The mistake was made when employees priced a case of water using the single-bottle price for each bottle in the case.”
https://twitter.com/kenklippenstein/status/902571298521399296
