Specsavers till rings up eye-watering £4bn price for bottle of eye drops

A customer has spoken of his shock when he was asked to pay an eye-watering £4 billion for a bottle of eye drops from a branch of Specsavers.

Cameraman Martyn Chidlow had recently had his eyes checked at the store in Wrexham, north Wales, when he went in to buy the bottle of drops to stop his eyes getting dry.

But the father-of-two said he “couldn’t believe his eyes” when he saw the figure of £4,031,626,711.51 pop up on the till – the equivalent of more than half the annual NHS bill for Wales – instead of the expected £9.95 price.

The 55-year-old, from Wrexham, told the Press Association: “I’d recently had my eyes tested and I’d popped in to get the prescription and to get the eye drops because I get dry eyes.

“The girl scanned the drops and then she was having a bit of a nightmare as she scanned it again and this price popped up.

“I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw the price on the screen, I’m glad I’d just had my eyes tested.

“I said to the assistant ‘I was going to pay by cash but I guess I’ll have to use my card’.

“I caused quite a stir as I just started giggling, I felt sorry for the lady at the till as she was trying to sort it out.

“She was really good and got it all sorted very quickly. It wasn’t human error, it was just a problem with the computerised till.

“I joked later with my wife that I was glad I’d been to Specsavers or I might not have spotted the mistake.”

A spokeswoman for Specsavers said: “Our in-store scanners are very sensitive and in this instance appear to have processed the customer’s ID number, instead of the product’s barcode.

“The mistake was sorted in moments – looks like our scanners should have gone to Specsavers.”