Representatives of the nation’s seven major hypermarket and supermarket chains yesterday pledged to provide low-price consumer goods to assist the government in stabilizing retail prices.
At a press conference presided over by Vice Premier Jiang Yi-huah (江宜樺) at the Executive Yuan, representatives from RT-Mart, Carrefour, A.mart, Pxmart, Wellcome, Matsusei, and Taisugar said that they provided 16 kinds of daily consumer goods at lower prices.
According to the Consumer Protection Commission, Carrefour, which has the most outlets of hypermarkets in the country, will have a weekly sale of over 1,000 products with an average discount of 30 percent. RT Mart said it will hold a sale of 10 products each week, while A.Mart will feature NT$39 boxed meals and 16 different kinds of daily necessities on sale.
Photo: Fang Pin-chao, Taipei Times
Local supermarket giant Pxmart, with 616 locations nationwide, will cut prices on half of its goods.
Wellcome and Matsusei, two other popular supermarket chains, will follow suit and launch discounted goods, including frozen noodles, rice, beverages and toilet paper,officials said.
Low-price areas have been set up in all 1,088 stores, Jiang said.
“Products sold in the areas are not merchandise that do not have brand names. Rather, they are all products which people are familiar with. Compared with the same or similar products sold elsewhere, they are very competitively priced,” he said.
The items on sale are not approaching their expiry date and neither are they defective, he added.
Jiang added that the Consumer Protection Commission has set up a Web site in which information on discounts in each of the seven hypermarket and supermarket chains is available to the public at www.cpc.gov.tw/eprice.asp.
Additional reporting by CNA
The Taipei Department of Health yesterday said it has launched a probe into a restaurant at Far Eastern Sogo Xinyi A13 Department Store after a customer died of suspected food poisoning. A preliminary investigation on Sunday found missing employee health status reports and unsanitary kitchen utensils at Polam Kopitiam (寶林茶室) in the department store’s basement food court, the department said. No direct relationship between the food poisoning death and the restaurant was established, as no food from the day of the incident was available for testing and no other customers had reported health complaints, it said, adding that the investigation is ongoing. Later
REVENGE TRAVEL: A surge in ticket prices should ease this year, but inflation would likely keep tickets at a higher price than before the pandemic Scoot is to offer six additional flights between Singapore and Northeast Asia, with all routes transiting Taipei from April 1, as the budget airline continues to resume operations that were paused during the COVID-19 pandemic, a Scoot official said on Thursday. Vice president of sales Lee Yong Sin (李榮新) said at a gathering with reporters in Taipei that the number of flights from Singapore to Japan and South Korea with a stop in Taiwan would increase from 15 to 21 each week. That change means the number of the Singapore-Taiwan-Tokyo flights per week would increase from seven to 12, while Singapore-Taiwan-Seoul
BAD NEIGHBORS: China took fourth place among countries spreading disinformation, with Hong Kong being used as a hub to spread propaganda, a V-Dem study found Taiwan has been rated as the country most affected by disinformation for the 11th consecutive year in a study by the global research project Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem). The nation continues to be a target of disinformation originating from China, and Hong Kong is increasingly being used as a base from which to disseminate that disinformation, the report said. After Taiwan, Latvia and Palestine ranked second and third respectively, while Nicaragua, North Korea, Venezuela and China, in that order, were the countries that spread the most disinformation, the report said. Each country listed in the report was given a score,
POOR PREPARATION: Cultures can form on food that is out of refrigeration for too long and cooking does not reliably neutralize their toxins, an epidemiologist said Medical professionals yesterday said that suspected food poisoning deaths revolving around a restaurant at Far Eastern Department Store Xinyi A13 Store in Taipei could have been caused by one of several types of bacterium. Ho Mei-shang (何美鄉), an epidemiologist at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Biomedical Sciences, wrote on Facebook that the death of a 39-year-old customer of the restaurant suggests the toxin involved was either “highly potent or present in massive large quantities.” People who ate at the restaurant showed symptoms within hours of consuming the food, suggesting that the poisoning resulted from contamination by a toxin and not infection of the