I went into a B&Q shed today[1] and I see that they have taken unit pricing to a new extreme - WD40 was 1.1p per ml.
I've stopped using Alan, as in my experience their compost grows lots of bloody mushrooms in places where I don't want them as a result of the amount of spent mushroom compost their suppliers mix with the composted food waste and other crap.
I bought 12 bags of the stuff last year and had to sieve every bloody bag ending up with two builders buckest of plastic, unbreakable lumps, stones and even bits of glass.
Cash
If you want cheap potting compost, stuff plastic bags full of dead leaves (tight as you can), seal/tie off and chuck them under the hedge for a few months. They rot down to wonderful compost.
How can they price stuff in units that cannot be bought, that is just being silly. Brian
It's for comparison shopping. Which is better value, a container holding
60ml for £2.00 or one holding 100ml for £3.50? If the shelf label shows the price per ml or per 100ml or even per litre, then it's obvious which one is cheaper, even if you are arithmetically challenged. The supermarkets are required by law do the same with all goods sold in containers. It can get silly when you buy a kilogramme of margarine, and the shelf edge label has to say something like "£3.00 per container (£3.00 per kilogramme)"
It's been done with petrol/diesel fuel for years.
It is even sillier on Amazon where all sorts of things have a price per kg. Like hair dryers and books (I CBA to check for real examples - they are so weird but difficult to find on purpose).
Supermarkets have been doing it for ages. For comparison purposes.
But not to the smallest of units. Per 100ml seems common for items sold in small quanities, per litre for larger quantities.
The B&Q per ml price was for something sold in a 400ml can. The reason I noticed it was because it wasn't in small print. The 1.1p per ml was in a font size equal to the price of the item.
Except even then, supermarkets have sneaky little tricks. I've noticed they mix up the scalar units, to mislead the arithmetically challenged*. Pricing one brand in £/100g and another next to it in £/Kg.
Another trick is to price larger packs more than smaller packs, playing on the publics intuition that per item, a 10 pack of something is cheaper than a 5 pack. Quite often I have found myself buying two packs of something, rather than the larger pack which is twice the weight, as it's cheaper that way.
*There's a sort of nobility about people who are so ****ing stupid. A few weeks ago I was shopping, and was asked by a lady to pass a large box of Weetabix (48), as my trolley was blocked in against the shelf. I did, and happened to notice that there was a promotion marked which made 2 smaller boxes (24s) cheaper than the single large box. I pointed this out, got a withering look, and told "yes, but I want 48" as she sashayed off.
Shopper psychology ? It's a little like putting "reduced" on items that you've increased the prices of. *Someone* is bound to be taken in.
That's not "psychology", it's simple dishonesty.
Maybe in the withering woman's opinion, only people who are too
****ing stupid to earn a decent wage in the first place, would need to be scratching around looking for bargain offers on Weetabix.A sort of low rent, supermarket version, of "conspicuous consumption" if you like.
michael adams
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Tesco do that a lot. 500ml can of Rockstar energy drink. 99p everywhere, £1:39 in Tesco. 2 weeks later "reduced to £1, save 39p".
Sounds like a Tommy Cooper joke
They are doing that sort of thing with their coupons - 50p off product xx - but it has gone up by 50p (or more) since last week.
or "But these go up to 48"
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