Poundland (in the UK) sells a set of three AAA Duracell Plus batteries for £1.
The batteries are sold in a blister pack The cells seem to have all the small print of a genuine Duracell on. However the backing card of the blister pack has some nondescript brand name on it and makes no reference to Duracell.
Are these real Duracells?
If not then why would a known chain like Pouldland really try to deliberately pass off counterfeit goods as the real thing?
Andy ha escrito:
I've often seen imported pepsi, head and shoulders and the like in such shops. Sometimes German or Greek. This may well be the case here, hence the different p=E0ckaging. I've seen worse in markets though - batteries like Durasell, Duraking, Powercell, panashiba, panacell, etc etc. all with the distinctive gold and black colours of the original. The minute you actually touch one though, you realise it is garbage - really flimsy non-alkaline batteries.
Difficult to say for sure what's going on with this poundland case without actually seeing the pack. Maybe as a research project you could buy one and post a jpeg of it (and make a name for yourself in investigative journalism!) ;-) =20
-B
Thus spaketh Andy:
They will be probably be the same as when Richer Sounds were selling Duracell's cheap.
They bulk buy them in and then re-package them.
Surely what's more likely is that they are from a specially-packaged batch made up for sale into a particular market, perhaps overseas, and either the order fell through or they are selling off the excess. Isn't it?
Thus spaketh rrh:
Could be, but when I worked for one company we were able to bulk buy Duracell batteries in thousands and thousands, Duracell know there are companies who will need lots of batteries and don't want to buy them in small packs.
When I enquired with Duracell about the batteries sold in Richer Sounds, they said they were the bulk buy items re-packaged.
They could well be as you describe, I'm only going on what we were able to buy in and what Richer Sounds had done.
|Poundland (in the UK) sells a set of three AAA Duracell Plus batteries |for ?1. | |The batteries are sold in a blister pack The cells seem to have all the |small print of a genuine Duracell on. However the backing card of the |blister pack has some nondescript brand name on it and makes no |reference to Duracell. | |Are these real Duracells? | |If not then why would a known chain like Pouldland really try to |deliberately pass off counterfeit goods as the real thing?
Unlikely. Duracell will protect their copyright of the name at law. Have you looked at the date on the pack? Are they out of date? Alkaline batteries have many years shelf life, so even if outdated I would expect them to work fine.
Nope. The real thing as are all the other makes sold. Bulk buying is the name of the game! Trading standards would have been down their throats if fake.
CRF
Indeed, I bought some Panasonic Extreme AA last year (much better than Duracell IMHO,) and they were dated 2013...
tox
I once bought a pack of Duracells like that & found they were almost dead - closer examination revealed they all had different date codes - I suspect someone had been repackaging used ones..!
So roughly 33p a piece? I doubt they are fakes.
Buy them from the right suppliers, in quantities as low as x 20 and they are less than 20p a piece with use by dates of 2012 or higher.
Without prejudice to any particular shop or chain, be careful of cheap batteries and particularly of Duracell. There are many of these in circulation that are the cheapest of zin chloride cells, with a fake label and packaging. Some even have the original "lucky golden hedgehog" wrapper on underneath. Rip one apart and check the inner construction if you want to be sure.
Easily (in the shop) you can check the shape of the tin and whether this is appropriate for an alkaline. Zinc carbon or zinc chloride cells have the insulator at the +ve end (the nipple), alkalines have it at the flat -ve end. I've not seen any myself yet, but there are also now said to be fake alkalines masquerading as Duracells.
I doubt if this faking problem is limited to Duracells, they're just a recognisable brand to forge.
Personally I don't like Duracells and find Ikea's own to be the best performance and best price.
I find stores like poundland excellent, because you really get the sense of how much margins some companies and their channels are used to.
It is sometimes hard to accept, because we have being conditioned to think of price=value. But the price of goods, is largely not connected to the cost of production, but how much the consumer is willing to spend.
Take common cleaning products, which we all but, such as washing powder or floor cleaner. They are all made from pretty basic chemicals, and are made up in enormous quantities. Who here reckons the cost of production for a 2kg box of washing powder is far less then the transportation costs to get it to the supermarket??
Back to the duracel thing, they are pretty simple, basic alkaline batteries, largely unchanged for decades, yet you go to garage to buy them and you wont come away with much change from £5....
Gaz
Too right. Go to Tesco and see what they are charging for a bottle of white label cola. 15p? Forget the contents: that price is made up of profit, bottle, filling and labelling, transport and handling. Except for the profit, these costs are the same for a bottle of the real thing,
89p?, whose contents can only cost pence at most. Which leaves a very nice additional margin to be shared between Coca-Cola and the retailer.
It's probably cheaper to make the real thing than a fake. If you're tooled up to make batteries 24 hrs a day, you're bound to end up with surplus stock sometimes, which you will sell to Poundland or Lidls just to keep the production line going
They've been selling Duracell for years so there's obviously a ready supply.
MBQ
Less than 2 pence for the bottle, the cap, the label and the contents.
A few year ago, when working in a can making factory, that the complete can cost about 1p and the contents cost about 0.01p.
this reminds me of a time years ago when I was working in a garage shop on Saturdays. This was a small garage in the middle of nowhere that had stock of all sorts and the boss insisted on working in the same way as he had for the last 60 years - a fixed markup. I remember we got a box of hand drills in from somewhere on some stupid price that meant by the time we had marked them up they were 93p each. A load were stuck on the end of the counter and they caused plenty of interest - but we sold none.
After a couple of weeks we put them up to 2.99 or something and they flew out of the shop. Dunno if this is still the case these days what with all the pound shops and places like lidl and aldi offering very cheap stuff all of the time.
Sometimes, things are *so* cheap that people assume they must be rubbish (like the LED torches mentioned on here recently...)
Dishwasher tablets annoy me - I want some bog standard dishwasher tablets. I don' want the ones that have salt and rinse aid and lord knows what else in at 30pence a tablet :-(
Darren
So, if Dixon's buys a CR 2032 button cell for 10p, how much should they mark it up then?
30%? 50%? 100%?If they mark it up 200% they'll incur a loss every time they make a sale.
tox
You should be annoyed. There is no way the tablets can replace the salt in the dishwasher. The salt regenerates the ion exchange resin in the softener. The dirty water with the "salt" function in it doesn't go anywhere near the resin.
I use asda smart price ones myself.
HomeOwnersHub website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here. All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.