Osterhase? Nur solange der Vorrat reicht

“Nur solange der Vorrat reicht” is one of those standard German sentences that you often see on any type of special offer that a shop or online vendor advertises for.  Quite simply it means “while stocks last”.

So, as in the English equivalent, you might find that an offer is particularly popular and goes out of stock.

However, this being Germany there are rules on how long a product has to be “in stock” for a shop to be able to claim this, so that they do not purposely have very few available and just use the offer to get people to enter the store.  In the event that they do run out without a certain amount of time, they have to offer the consumers who want to take advantage of it the chance to receive the product later at the advertised price.

Now the rule is pretty complicated, and I won’t go into detail here.  In fact, I can just about remember the details of one-week offers, but any others I would have to look up myself.

But I could have done with knowing the rules in Karstadt in Bad Homburg today.  Not that it would have helped me much, but here is what happened anyway:

I received a voucher in the post from Karstadt for a 200g chocolate Osterhase (Easter Bunny) if I spent 50 Euros in the store.  But not just any Osterhase, there were offering me a Lindt Goldhase.

That is, one of these:

Lindt is a Swiss chocolate company and Goldhase is one of their most well-known products – the product form is even a registered 3D trademark.  The 200g version is worth about 5 Euros.

So today when I actually did spend 50 Euros in Karstadt, I was looking forward to bringing one home with me.

However the cashier popped something that was not goldfoil-wrapped into the carrier bag and it didn’t look quite right.  So I took it back out again, and it was a 50g chocolate Osterhase from a company in Bavaria.

I questioned this with the cashier, but all she could say was “that’s all I have”, before finally admitting that the store had run out of Lindt Goldhasen.

Now, I’m not going to make a big fuss about a chocolate bunny rabbit, and I do not know if is OK to run out this early (the offer runs until Easter Saturday), but what I do object to is the fact that Karstadt are still selling the Lindt version in the same store.

So what has really happened is that they have run out of the giveaway stock.

I wonder if they are allowed to do that?  Perhaps I should call the Verbraucherzentrale on Monday…