Needed some sanding sheets the other day, and so nipped along to B&Q. Wow! Result! The overpriced sanding sheets were all on 3-for-2. So I buy more than I immediately need, but in the knowledge that I'll use them eventually. End up buying 6 items, and put them through the self-scanner in the following order:
£8.08 £7.18 £7.18 £5.58 £5.58 £5.58
And guess what they took off in the totals? £7.18 + £5.58? Or £5.58 + £5.58?
The latter, of course. Annoying - as if I'd done it as two transactions, that's what I'd have got. Wonder what the legalities of that are? It certainly differs from the way Boots or Sainsburys do this, where they refund like groups of three. In my instance, I lost out on £1.60 - but imagine if the first group of three had been £15.75, £15.75 and £14.20 for instance!! I'd have been expecting £14.20 + £5.58.
Do they? When I've read their 3for2 offers, they seem to say cheapest item free, I see what you mean, probably I've never bought two simultaneous 3for2s ...
Takes longer than a till with Old Arthritic Doris...
Beep: Please put your item in the collection area. I did you moron, can't you see 10 grams?
Beep: Please seek assistance. You must be 21 to buy a filler knife? Wot!? I'd be more dangerous with a frozen trout! (I did actually say that to the bloke).
Why 21 anyway? You can wield automatic weapons and die for your country at 16. You can do everything else at 18, including owning a house (well, if you're rich). But you cannot buy a chisel (or a filler knife apparantly) to fix it nor buy glue to mend stuff... FFS. Why not ban posession of glass bottles and pint glasses?
You can do everything else at 18, including owning
apparantly) to fix it nor buy glue to mend stuff...
Never could understand this. If I was under-age and felt the need to do a bit of stabbing in the side, I might steal the knife, but there again, I could just borrow one from mi mam's kitchen drawer
I went to ASDA and saw the frying pan I wanted among several saucepans and the like from the same manufacturer. The lable said "any two for.." whateer, I forget the details.
Apparently the offer was for any two identical frying pans. I wonder how many people paid full price on those purchases without realising they were being conned.
I got away with it as I was thinking about the production costs for frying pans that mark the =A310 difference between the good ones and the bad. And why I could buy a 5 litre Slow Cooker form the same store for the same price. So Iqureid the girl on the till when it went through.
I might have been savouring thoughts the sugar free icecream I'd just discovered they sell. The first icecream I could enjoy in a long while. I'd have been mortally ****** off if I'd suffered a mind wipe at vital moment in there.
You have to watch'em, on the end of an aisle were 2 x 9(twin bar) Kit-Kats for £2.50 In the usual aisle they had 2 x 16(twin bar) for £3. Buggers is right.
So I decided to buy a saucepan and the frying pan. (Just to clarify.)
I'm not a frequent visitor. What do you mean? What is two for =A32?
There was a substantial reduction in the combined price of the two utensils I was going to buy. 4 quid I think. That's what set me thinking how much do the damned things really cost?
I can't imagine the skills, equipment and even the raw materials used in the price of a Chinese cheapo and a Western European rookyou are in the region of 3 or 4 times the price of the cheap one.
Not when the same country can supply a well made electric cooker for the same price as the European frying pan.
Most of the big supermarkets have shelf edge offers. You have to watch the wording:
"Any 2 for =A32" means any 2 of selected items (normally described on the ticket) for =A32.
"2 for =A32" means 2 of that item only for =A32.
Combine that with "Buy one, Get One Free" and combinations of the above with variable packet sizes and getting best value for money needs a calculator. Quickly now, in your head, which option gives the best value in these offers:
3 x 350g packs for =A35 or 300g for =A32.99?
7 pack for =A31.16 or 12 pack for =A32.29?
2 x 240g for =A33.00 or 2 x 400g for =A35.00?
They are real offers and numbers BTW bonus points for getting the products as well. B-)
Cost price to the supermarket retail packed and delivered to a distribution center probably only 20p each. Retail markups are huge.
Nitwit. There is a cachet fror being a household name for something that everyone uses or aspires to use. But when it comes to a very occasional buy for joe public, mass sales marketing rules.
You don't advertise "any" two for a saving of whatever if you are selling the same genus of the specie side by side, unless you intend to allow the buyer to make a choice from the family of cookware. What is so difficult for you to comprehend about that?
If you don't need two identical utensils, what are you going to try and work out?
As it happened I didn't really need another saucepan and would have gone for the slow cooker had I not seen the advert.
Electric cookers seem to have gone to the dogs. Might be because some loathe them, but they have gone distinctly crappy.
Sort of like "matsui or lucky goldstar vacuum formed". Knobs are poor quality, often non-central on the shaft, lettering falls off, grills are badly designed, separate catalytic liners are replaced by crude integral sprayup with overspray, everything feels "half way to communist manufacturer", and that is =A3649 same-junk-many-different- labels.
The older 1990 =A3649 (admittedly =A31200 in today's money) were much better built with "quality components", although often inferior paint jobs mainly because they sprayed up over half rusting metal in the first place.
Like Homebase "nasty orange beech effect PVC foil" which is so "foil" it does not conform to the underlying wood edge and can be massaged around like badly applied sticky back plastic. Cooker hoods with GM- style switchgear which if used more than once or twice falls to bits, jams, zaps every TV in the house etc. Oven knobs seem worst in stainless where they are the thinnest foil they could find and have the tactile quality of a bit of wood spinning eccentrically on a bent rusty screw. Just ghastly consumer goods. Then you have Miele-priced designer which is little more than "aimed at a makeover photograph".
Even Miele are beginning to dumb down their vacuum cleaner designs, although perhaps thankfully from the old S3 S4 rambo models which had hose couplings like a PWR water hookup pipe and massive S4 (9kg) were like dragging a reluctant track lacking King Tiger. Miele latest entry designs (4.5kg) are "a bit skimpy but thankfully lightweight", mainly through elimination of parts, metal parts, cost & parts count.
Laptops... bouncy keyboards... flexy shells... glossy non-anti-glare screens unreadable in office or wall lighting... the cost difference of removing those deficits is actually tiny.
Most of the big supermarkets have shelf edge offers. You have to watch the wording:
"Any 2 for £2" means any 2 of selected items (normally described on the ticket) for £2.
"2 for £2" means 2 of that item only for £2.
Combine that with "Buy one, Get One Free" and combinations of the above with variable packet sizes and getting best value for money needs a calculator. Quickly now, in your head, which option gives the best value in these offers:
3 x 350g packs for £5 or 300g for £2.99?
7 pack for £1.16 or 12 pack for £2.29?
2 x 240g for £3.00 or 2 x 400g for £5.00?
They are real offers and numbers BTW bonus points for getting the products as well. B-)
Cost price to the supermarket retail packed and delivered to a distribution center probably only 20p each. Retail markups are huge.
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I once listened to the managing directors of Amari handbags, an engineering company and some other big company talking.
All said that the cost of producing the item they sell was about 30% of the retail price. Then 50% or so for admin, advertising, rental, etc etc. The balance of 20% was for tax and hopefully a profit.
Margins are extremely high when the product is outsourced and then upsold in the West by marketing, usually with fake technical details to an undefined standard or unchecked (tyres to batteries to components). Favourite trick is to supply a sample component that meets spec during ITB, then supply completely different junk as a production run. Has burnt quite a few dipping into outsourcing to reduce parts cost over the years - major brands from appliances to power supplies.
By extremely high margins, even components can be sold like products undercutting by a factor of 10 competitors and still provide an army of area manager's & Audi TDI, and saturation marketing/sales operations, and massive end retail margins which cover the (relatively) sky high business rent/rates. It is the latter business rent/rates which has driven outsourcing which has damaged so much manufacturing - and why Germany relied on a currency shared with weak economies to maintain a weak currency so its manufacturers could remain competitive.
The West has sky high cost of living & operations, declining real pay levels & through global automation an exploding numbers of people to stuff in the service channel. It is a mix which is not sustainable - it will result in generational dislocation in standard of living which can not be hidden indefinately by debt & deficits.
Margins on Western products tend to be very much smaller - unless components "dumb down", marketeering is unsurprisingly responsible for a lot of destruction. We can engineer it, we can almost still make it, but finance & marketing combined were more interested in not doing R&D, not risking investment money which they preferred to spend on themselves. You can not spend your way to a millionaire, but you can live like one for a short time - until millionaire itself must be devalued by inflation to wipe away the excess debt, creating yet more problems.
I cannot understand those glossy screens. They are not poor quality (!) they are supposed to be like that. They are sold as a desirable feature with some nonsensical marketing name I cannot remember, and, as you say, are unusable. You sit there squinting through reflections, and end up putting a cloth over your head and the screen like they did with those old style cameras, in order to see anything. I think they are a "high impact screen - looks like glossy magazine pages" or something. Me no understand ! Simon.
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