D.A. Wins Order in Drive to Halt Never-Ending Sales

The Orange County district attorney’s yearlong effort to crack down on so-called never-ending sales has produced the first of what could be a series of enforcement actions against firms it accuses of engaging in deceptive advertising.

The county prosecutor’s consumer fraud unit has won a consent judgment requiring Frame-n-Lens Optical Inc.--a San Diego-based maker of eyeglasses with nine Orange County outlets--to pay a $50,000 fine and to halt its alleged misleading advertising.

Frame-n-Lens, which has 72 offices statewide, did not admit to wrongdoing in consenting to the judgment last week.

The company, in fact, was “very cooperative” and took down its sale signs and stopped advertising routine prices as sale prices as soon as it was contacted by the district attorney’s office, Deputy Dist. Atty. Gay Geiser-Sandoval said.

“There are more egregious cases out there,” she said.

Ronald Joseph, executive vice president of Frame-n-Lens, said Wednesday in an interview that the company denied any wrongdoing but decided to settle the case for $50,000 because it would have cost more in legal fees to fight it.

The never-ending sale--a practice in which merchandise is always marketed at “sale” prices or is never sold at “original” prices listed in ads--has become a rampant problem in the retail industry, Geiser-Sandoval said.

In Orange County, prosecutors are charting prices of about 10 companies, including major department stores and furniture stores, to see whether the items advertised are really on sale. Prosecutors in other counties, such as Ventura, are also investigating consumer complaints of false sales.

Geiser-Sandoval said never-ending sales confuse and mislead consumers by seeming to offer discounts for only a short time, when the apparent bargain items are actually being sold at regular prices.

“If you feel you have to act by Saturday to take advantage of a sale, you may have no chance to get around and compare prices to see if it’s really a sale,” she said. “The word ‘sale’ becomes meaningless.”

In addition, she said, a never-ending sale violates the state’s false advertising law and is unfair to other businesses because they must compete with a company that is doing something unlawful.

In the Frame-n-Lens case, Geiser-Sandoval said, the company advertised a weeklong sale on glasses in Sunday newspapers. A week later, though, the same ads appeared listing the same prices and a new expiration date of the following Saturday.

The company also posted signs touting a “sale” and offering two pairs of glasses for $59 continuously plastered on the windows of its outlets, she said.

Joseph said the advertising was an outgrowth of heated competition in the discount eyeglass industry.

“We did move our prices up and down to try to sell below our competitors,” he said.

The sale advertising “worked real well the first three or four years because prices changed every month,” Joseph said, but he acknowledged that the company continued its advertising even after prices stabilized in the last year or so.

He said Frame-n-Lens halted its sale advertising after Geiser-Sandoval contacted executives.