Big 5 Fined $125,000 for False Advertising

A Ventura County Superior Court judge has levied $125,000 in fines against the Big 5 Sporting Goods Store chain for falsely advertising cheaply made, imitation brand-name running shoes as the real thing.

Judge Edwin M. Osborne also signed an injunction forbidding the chain from further acts of misleading advertising and unfair competition, and from trying to pass off the imitations as the genuine shoes.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Joseph R. Buckalew said the chain agreed as part of the judgment to stop the misleading shoe sales in all of its about 125 stores in California, Nevada and Washington state. Buckalew said Big 5 sold at least 300,000 to 400,000 pairs of the imitation running shoes within the past three to four years.

Osborne’s ruling resulted from a civil suit filed by the Ventura County district attorney’s office, which charged Big 5’s parent company, United Merchandising Corp., with false advertising and unfair business practices.

The district attorney began investigating the shoe sales in June, 1988, when marathon runner Gary Tuttle, who owns a competing running shoe store, complained that the shoes Big 5 was selling seemed to be badly made.

Big 5 had claimed that it was selling running shoes made by companies such as New Balance, Etonic and Saucony at discount prices.

The shoes were made by those companies, but they were poorly manufactured reproductions of the companies’ top-of-the-line shoes, Buckalew said.

For instance, Big 5 sold a shoe advertised as the New Balance 660 for $19.99 instead of the list price of $66.99. The real 660 had a plastic heel cup that braced the foot, but the copy sold by Big 5 had a flexible cardboard heel cup that gives a runner’s foot little support.

And the copy of the Etonic Alpha-I shoe, which sold for $19.99 instead of the original $62.99, had a rigid sole with a red line painted on its edge instead of the flexible sole of the real shoe, which had a red plastic heel support sandwiched into the sole.