Re: Result!

[SteveH]

Here, this might help you understand;

[SteveH]

This was one area in which the industry took a knock in a big way when Morrison's took over Safeway and scrapped the Safeway IT systems in favour of laminated paper and chinagraphs.

Safeway were in the process of making a huge and groundbreaking move in terms of price labelling, as they were trialling electronic shelf edge pricing in several stores. The potential for the system was almost limitless - not only did it mean almost 100% price accuracy (the shelf display could never display a different price to the scanning file, unless the receiver was broken, but this would be highlighted on an exceptions report for replacement anyway), but it could also mean 'happy hour' pricing on either individual products and categories.

Combine that with RFID, which was being looked into, and you'd have very impressive controls over stock and pricing.

[totallydeadmailbox]

I know that other supermarket chains were looking at what you call 'happy hour' pricing, only with slightly different motives.

The reasoning is as follows:

Who goes shopping in the middle of the morning? Answer: the jobless, or housewives, or the retired. Who goes shopping at lunchtime? Answer: quite a lot of people. Who goes shopping at, say 7-8pm? Answer: people who, on average, have rather more serious higher-paying jobs and are on their way home after working a bit late.

The idea is that you can 'tune' prices to the demographics according to time of day. Put the special offers on cans of baked beans and frozen fish fingers before noon, for example, and jack up the prices of other goods. Come the evening, target other items for special offers and jack up other prices.

It met with some resistance because people deduced, possibly correctly, that it could be used to discriminate between poor and wealthy shoppers (yes) and penalise the former (possibly). Anyway, AFAIK it hasn't happened. Yet.

Given the data collection now possible, and the tracking of your shopping times, spend and types of purchases (through the loyalty cards), I think it's only a matter of time before we see something along these lines, though.

[Andy Hall]

Instead of which, they thought that moving down market and seling pies was the way to go.

[Andy Hall]

I patently don't

That's your profile, because you seem to think that people people who subscribe to high standards are snobs. I would put it to you that this represents inverted snobbery on your part.

Er no.

You introduced the topics of gender and ethnicity, not me.

[Andy Hall]

Mmm.... Look at them, and the ratios with LDL and HDL if you reduce fast carbohydrate intake as well.

[ogden]

Sounds more like they'd be penalising the latter while the former get all the economy beefburgers they can handle.

[Steve Firth]

Hmm, I'm not convinced. Back in the days when I used to bother which such stuff the food technologists were stuffing a lot of sucrose into food because of the "mouth feel". They also told me that it was impossible to reduce the sucrose because it was the texture as much as the sweetness that people craved. Then it would be at least 5% sucrose if not 10% and for products that were suppsoed to be sweet or where the sweetness could be camouflaged obviously much more. I can't recall the concentration of locost, karaya and guar gum added to foods, but the quantities used don't strike me as having been in the "fractional" percentages. Even modified starch was used at around 10-30% depending on just how jelly-like the end product was supposed to be.

I've tried some of these low fat things in the past. I must say they all strike me as nasty, particularly the Heinz products. Glutinous and gummy in the extreme.

[Andy Hall]

.. and far more harmful than traditional recipes. 95% fat free though.

[DR]

On Mon, 17 Mar 2008 09:57:29 -0000, ":Jerry:" is alleged to have written:

The sort of retorts which a 12-year old would consider infantile aren't exactly helping your argument, you know.

[dennis]

GL and GI are OK, I have been using them to treat my medical problem for 30 years now. Of course it wasn't called GI and GL then, that's just the trendy names for knowing how many calories there are and how fast they get out. Just think about it.. if I thought people were as stupid as they appear to be I could have written a diet book and been rich. ;-)

[Andy Bonwick]

Do you sleep well at night knowing they let a mechanical animal like me loose on things that can create a 30 mile exclusion zone?

[The Older Gentleman]

Indian curries?

[Andy Hall]

Indeed.

In reality, it's not complicated if one focuses on the issues, although combination of food types and timing are sometimes challenging.

[dennis]

Currently 3 and 1 respectively. Need to try and lower the 3 a bit I think.. maybe some fish oil?

[Stuart Noble]

I know it gets complicated when different foods and temperatures are involved, but certainly you can stand your spoon up in half a percent xanthan gum in water. Hair gel is about the same concentration of Carbopol resin, so it's possible to create gels without adding anything very much. Whether it tastes of anything, and whether anybody would buy the product, is another matter.

[Stuart Noble]

Harmful to you maybe. We're all different. High time the food preachers realised that

[Andy Hall]

Actually harmful to most people to one degree or another but I agree with you about food preachers/ One size doesn't fit all

[Andy Hall]

Possible. I eat raw tuna and raw salmon for this purpose.

[Stuart Noble]

Eat what you like, what you really, really like. As I get older fewer things fall in that category so I guess we self regulate to an extent.