Legal News

In Price-Fixing Settlement, Retailers to Give Away $175M in Cosmetics

By Dan Slater

Fancy some Vera Wang Princess Body Polish? How about a bottle of Lovely Sarah Jessica Parker Shower Gel? Primordiale Skin Defence by Lancome?

Starting next week, reports BusinessWeek, several big retailers, including Macy’s and Nordstrom, will give away $175 million worth of free high-end cosmetics as part of a class-action settlement alleging that the stores planned to fix prices.

The offer is part of an agreement to settle a suit filed in 2003 in a California federal court that alleged the stores tried to limit sales and scale back on the amount of cosmetics in their inventory, keeping both prices and competition high. The department stores — which also include Bergdorf Goodman, Bergner’s, Bloomingdale’s, Boston Store, Carson Pirie Scott, Dillard’s, Gottschalks, Herberger’s, Neiman Marcus, Parisian, Saks Fifth Avenue, and Younkers — have denied any wrongdoing.

The products will be available starting Jan. 20. A class member will be eligible to receive one free cosmetics product from one of the manufacturer defendants from which he or she purchased department store cosmetics during the class period, May 29, 1994 through July 16, 2003. Click here for the list of giveaways.

LB’ers: In the past, these kind of ’settlements’ have raised questions over the value of class actions. After all, how many class members will actually redeem their award? As for the lawyers, are they paid with cosmetics, too? What say you?

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on January 14, 2009 (boomark / email).