[Thanks to Tony O’Brien for sending this one in to us recently. For those of you not familiar with Tesco and their marketing slogans, this is their corporate website.]

ManagementToday.com has a great story (from 25th November) of how six bicycles purchased by Tesco from a supplier came with an apparent£1million (US$1.62 million) price tag.

Some red faces at Tesco HQ this morning, after news emerged that Britain’s biggest supermarket accidentally paid one of its suppliers almost £1m for six bikes.

The unit cost for each bicycle turns out to be a whopping £164000 instead of the usual £164.

While the majority of the money was repaid, the trouble for Tesco is that they are engaged in a dispute with the supplier in relation to other matters so the supplier has held on to 12% of the money. So Tesco have called in their lawyers. Which means that the total cost of failure will inevitably be much higher by the time the whole mess is sorted out.

Of course, simple consistency checks on data entry could have trapped that error and saved Tesco money and embarrassment.

It seems that with Information Quality, as with Retail Grocery, every little helps.