Vips made the beer price look like the dish price — PROFECO fined it 4.8M pesos

Vips, one of Mexico's largest restaurant chains, ran a promotion whose advertising confused what the price attached to: the ad displayed a chile relleno that appeared to cost 35 pesos, but 35 pesos was the price of the beer included in the purchase — the actual price of the dish was not mentioned at all. The promotion referenced 'seasonal dishes' without specifying which dishes those were or where to find out, and the disclaimer sat in a font size and colour PROFECO called impossible for consumers to read.

PROFECO notified Vips of preventive measures on 4 September 2021, giving the chain 24 hours to suspend the advertising, and announced a fine of 4.8 million pesos. The case was part of the sweep PROFECO presented in the president's morning press conference alongside Sony, Viva Aerobus and BP — four major brands named for misleading advertising in the same week.

The mechanism is price anchoring by misdirection: the eye pairs the price with the dish because the dish is what the ad wants you to want. PROFECO's case was that the pairing was false. A price that attaches to the wrong product is not a discount — it is the product being used as bait for a price that belongs to something cheaper.