Human error almost certainly resulted in hundreds of thousands of Co-op customers being charged twice for purchases made from its food stores and petrol station, the retailer has said.
Financial records revealed on Thursday morning that the supermarket had taken in twice its usual amount from customers on Wednesday.
A swift investigation found that human error was “almost certainly” to blame, according to a Co-op spokesman, but the exact cause was yet to be determined.
The company has declined to say how many customers were charged twice, but it is thought that hundreds of thousands of people were affected across Co-op’s 2,800 stores and 200 petrol stations in the UK.
A Co-op spokesman said: “Due to a processing error, customers who shopped with us or used a petrol filling station on 7 July using a credit or debit card were charged twice.
“We would like to apologise to all those affected, and reassure customers that refunds will be made directly into their accounts within 24 hours. We will also reimburse any customers who have incurred bank charges as a result of this error.”
Konstantinos Kougios, 40, discovered that he had been charged £7.08 twice when he read the Guardian article about the Co-op error on Thursday.
“It’s disturbing but, OK, it’s a mistake and they found it themselves,” he said. “It’s a bit worrying if I didn’t find it but it feels like a genuine mistake.”
Retail experts speculated that the error could have been caused by an employee pushing the payments through twice by mistake.
James Walker, founder of the free complaints resolution service Resolver, said some retailers process transactions in one huge batch.
“My gut feeling is that the system would have said ‘batch fail’ so they [the employee] resubmitted the batch [leading to two charges],” he said.
“This is a really rare event. I don’t think I’ve seen a large company make such an error.”
However, Walker praised the way Co-op handled what could have been a PR catastrophe. The retailer admitted the error within hours of it being discovered, urging customers with concerns to call the careline on 0800 068 6727.
“It’s one of those little embarrassing ‘My trousers are down, what am I going to do?’ moments,” said Walker.
“It’s good they owned up about it quite quickly but what else are they going to do?”It comes weeks after John Lewis overtook the Co-op to become the UK’s largest worker-owned business. Figures showed the Co-op’s food sales for 2014 fell 2.1% to £7.1bn.
This was a result of the wider Co-operative Group being hit by the reduction in its stake in the Co-operative Bank – which dropped from 100% to 20% – following its emergency re-capitalisation by hedge funds after the bank nearly collapsed in 2013.
The group was dragged to a £2.5bn annual loss that year after a £1.5bn hole was discovered in the lender’s balance sheet.
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