Greatest markup ever?

[Andy]

I was in my local newsagent in London and saw he had a card of button cells behind the till which he was selling at £2.99 each.

I recognised the card of cells as one which I can get from my local pound shop for £1. It contains about 16 cells.

Considering that the pound shop makes a profit then it will already have raised the price from something like 50p.

I can't say exactly what the mark up is here for the newsagent as he may get left with oddment batteries that he can't sell but he makes a markup of about £2.50 on 50p (500%) if he sold just one battery!

His total markup is in the thousands of percent.

Has anyone seen a bigger markup than that?

[dennis]

Just pop into a chemist and buy some perfume or aftershave.

[Madge O'Reene]

Soft drinks in pubs and night clubs - they buy the stuff in bulk as concentrate and mix it with carbonated water on site. A =A32.50 glass is

250ml and typically costs around 5p. Just as with the shop, you're paying for the convenience.

[Tony Bryer]

Homebase selling green sleeving in packets for 99p for a 1m length?

[Cuprager]

B&Q doing flexi monobloc tap tails for a tenner when screwfix have them for two quid!

[me]

250ml and typically costs around 5p. Just as with the shop, you're paying for the convenience.

In a pub or club or cafe you are not buying a drink. You are spending time in the owners property for which they have to pay he freehold or lease costs, business rates, water rates, fuel for heating, lighting, and cooling the place, all the furniture/carpets, glasses, equipment, staff costs, repairs to damage every week, alarms, the list goes on...

[John Cartmell]

Unless you know that he purchased the item from the same source as the pound shop you cannot make that assumption. Pound shops generally do not provide the continuity of products that is essential for trade. Comparing any other business with them is unacceptable unless you also accept the possibility of your retailers saying to you that the cells you require for essential equipment can no longer be supplied - and you should have bought them last week when they were dirt cheap.

A healthy economy does not function at the level of the sale of bankrupt stock.

[Madge O'Reene]

me:

Shops have many of those costs to cover too, along with all the theft that takes place from their shops too. I'm certainly not criticising either the shop or the pub for their mark up - with family in both industries, I'm aware that there's a huge amount of costs to make up between wholesale and retail prices. But pubs do make a much larger margin on soft drinks than they do on alcoholic drinks.

[Christian McArdle]

I think it is justifiable, though. You can't drink many pints of Coke in the same way you can with beer. I bet that statistically, a soft drinker will spend a lot longer in the pub for one drink that the average beer drinker. Therefore, soft drinks need to have a larger mark up to get a fairer share of the fixed costs.

Christian.

[Madge O'Reene]

Christian McArdle:

I totally agree. In fact, whereever there's a free market, such as the examples above, I believe that any pricing is fair and justifiable pricing. Smart retailers know that profiteering is only good for the short term.

[Lostgallifreyan]

"dennis@home" wrote in news:wd33g.58632$ [e-mail]:

Or value the plastic and isopropanol in the average audio gear cleaning kit.

[Phil Anthropist]

Yes, the water companies. They get their supplies FREE, waste at least a third of it, then rip us off for the rest.

Phil

[Mary Fisher]

I saw the same sort of thing in a shop in Lincoln some time ago. Unbelievable!

Mary

[Madge O'Reene]

Phil Anthropist:

Well, if you're being like that, any service industry could be said to do the same - they don't produce, just "do things". In the case of the water companies, they clean the water and deliver it to you on demand (by and large). You don't have to use them - you *could* collect and clean your own water.

For that matter, by your logic, you could say that (at the very least) arable farmers "don't pay" for the produce they sell, although there are a damned load of hidden costs that are needed to make the product available to you.

[Madge O'Reene]

Mary Fisher:

Why is it unbelievable?

What do you do for a living? Are the the LOWEST PAID person doing your job? In your company? In your town? In your country? In the world? Unbelievable!

Here's a simple idea - if you think a shop is charging too much, don't buy from them. If you think their margin is an acceptable price to pay for the convenience, then do buy from them. Or are you against the whole idea of shops making a profit, paying their staff and suppliers, etc?

[steeler]

Causes problems when they are trying to promote a designated driver scheme though.

[BrianE]

Yep, I'm sure my landlord is going to reduce my rent at next year's review and the local council is bound not to be increasing my business rate at around 20%.

The public haven't a scooby..

[Paul F]

??? WTFDTM? (work it out) OK Madgy baby - we get the picture: everything is for the best in the best of all free market worlds. Give it a rest now, eh?

Yours bored with you PaulF

[Andy McKenzie]

So stop paying them - you are welcome to hire a drilling rig, drill a borehole, install a pump and pump out the water you need. Building and operating your own sewage plant might be harder but you could probably set up a reed bed filtration scheme.

Andy

[Christian McArdle]

Actually, doing the sewage is easy with a Klargester Biodisc. Assuming the groundwater supply is OK, a borehole up to 20m3 a day doesn't even need permission. Drilling it could be expensive, though!

Christian.