Here in Sweden we have a law that forces shops to provide a "comparison price" on the price tag. Depending on the type of product, it's the price per volume, weight or unit. This makes it trivial to compare prices between products of different package sizes, and to notice shrinkflation.
Doesn't help detect changed ingredients that lower quality, though.
I thought this was a EU thing, but a quick search suggests that maybe it's something specific to us?
It is the law, with an exception for small shops, food "to go", etc. But, it only applies to the ordinary price. Any multibuy or conditional offer is excluded. Now stores have started putting the real price behind a free loyalty card without a unit price, and a ridiculous fake price (like, 2x or more) on the ordinary price tag. The Competition and Markets Authority has started an investigation.
That's good to know an investigation has been started. I can't believe anyone would fall for the "clubcard price" nonsense but requiring a clubcard and displaying a fake ridiculous price should both be illegal.
Tesco pioneered some of the most hilariously sharp practices that mean
you really need to have your wits (or enough money to not care) with
you.
"30p each or only 3 for £1" isn't a joke. I saw this in a London store
when they tried making multi-pack offers near the checkout actually
more expensive than picking up separate items.
"Meal Deals" are a fantastic scam that charge you more for eating
less. If you don't take the crisps or drink it doesn't "count" as the
meal-deal, and the individual items cost more. I end up buying an
extra bag of crisps I don't want and giving it to the homeless person
outside.
Like many British supermarkets they operate a three tier pricing
structure, normal, discounted (with yellow labels) and "Clubcard"
prices. These are applied to similar items on proximate shelves, so
you're never quite sure which ones the offers apply to. Sometimes
those little yellow stickers don't scan, and surprise.. you pay the
original price.
And don't get me started on automatic checkouts, which are basically
"mugging robots" designed to rob humans.
Supermarkets are playgrounds for screwing people over with little mind
games. What a desolation of human life for those who waste their days
thinking up this shit.
> "Meal Deals" are a fantastic scam that charge you more for eating less. If you don't take the crisps or drink it doesn't "count" as the meal-deal, and the individual items cost more.
How is "If you add a third item the price sometimes goes down" a scam?
I don't think that's quite true. If I just want a bottle of water I wouldn't buy a meal deal to get the real price. Some of the meal deal items are subsidised more than others, it's true, but that doesn't make it a scam. Paying £3.50 or whatever for quite a lot of stuff is pretty amazing.
You don't honestly think the supermarkets are letting you have it our of the goodness of their hearts do you? It's obvious what is going on:
* £3.50 is the price. That means they'll make a profit on that. It's a "low" price because it's garbage, tasteless, low-quality junk food,
* The supermarkets know which items are more likely to sell separately. Like your bottle of water example. So those items are individually priced higher while others that rarely sell separately (like sandwiches) will be individually priced low. Whatever it really is, the supermarket has all the data, they know how to win.
Similarly, it's like how people think shoplifters steal from the supermarket. The supermarket knows how much stuff gets stolen each year. They price accordingly. Shoplifters steal from you.
> * £3.50 is the price. That means they'll make a profit on that. It's a "low" price because it's garbage, tasteless, low-quality junk food,
This is wrong. They won't always make a profit. On some items they make a loss.
> * The supermarkets know which items are more likely to sell separately. Like your bottle of water example. So those items are individually priced higher while others that rarely sell separately (like sandwiches) will be individually priced low.
This is also wrong. These items a) have an actual unit price, which will differ depending on various factors, and b) compete with other vendors selling the same or similar, and c) need to be there or shoppers won't go the the shop in the first place.
There are many forces acting on these prices. Thinking profit is the only force is bound to be wrong.
Tesco posted a profit of about £1.5bn in 2022. Where exactly do you think this comes from?
I know about loss leaders, but I severely doubt meal deals are loss leaders considering they are placed at the front of the shop and customers often come in to buy them at lunch time. They are competing with the likes of Gregg's here.
It doesn't matter about the individual technicalities. What matters is the bottom line. You aren't beating Tesco.
> Tesco posted a profit of about £1.5bn in 2022. Where exactly do you think this comes from?
I think it comes from everything they sell. You're taking the business' overall performance and seemingly attributing it all to people not buying meal deals when they could.
> I know about loss leaders, but I severely doubt meal deals are loss leaders considering they are placed at the front of the shop and customers often come in to buy them at lunch time.
This is the definition of a loss leader. Bring people in to buy it, and they'll buy a few other things at the same time.
> What matters is the bottom line. You aren't beating Tesco.
These conversation-ending grand statements aren't relevant. I'm not trying to beat Tesco.
That an implementation problem. In the Netherlands self checkouts are very quick and painless. There are no weird ceremonials or a bagging area or whatever.
In the USA the implementation of self checkout varies wildly, and seems to be linked to the socioeconomic condition of the neighborhood.
Grocery shopping in rich neighborhood = scale has a large tolerance and will not stop you from continuing to scan if you place something unexpected on it. You can scan and bag in whatever order without the machine making any accusations.
In a poor neighborhood = you scan an item and put it on the scale, then put your bag from home on the scale to bag the first item. The scale is set to a strict tolerance and stops scanning items “UNEXPECTED ITEM IN BAGGING AREA” and you have to wait for an employee to unlock it.
As they say “there’s nothing more expensive than being poor”, and bad self-checkouts is just another factor in that.
In Finland in some shops you can take a barcode reader and bag the things directly as you go. In the automated counter you just put in the scanner and pay.
There are no scales and nobody would notice if you just don't scan the item. In theory there are "random" checks. I've never seen one happen though. Not having a huge desperate underclass makes many things a lot smoother.
When the unit price is only shown for the non-discounted price, I usually pull up my phone's calculator out of spite if I don't know what it works out to mentally.
Another thing that annoys me is there being no indication of how long a sale or promotion is running. Lidl does this correctly, and puts a to/from date on the price tag in tiny text. (for internal use, I assume. but still super useful)
"Clubcard prices" somehow avoid the laws on misleading discounts as well, where the price you're discounting from needs to be the lowest price that product was on sale for for the preceding 30 days.
The units are disingenuously applied in Tesco at least though which makes it difficult to compare.
For example you might have price per sht (well you need at least 4 per sh*t ;) but there will also be a 2 for 1 offer with no price per sht and then a multi pack with no offer on it with a different price per sht. So you have three factors to compare to work out how many sh*ts per sht are best value. And then there's the confusion of loyalty card only prices.
I have got to the point I'd rather shop at Waitrose because they don't pull that sht.
On that note I think I'll go to Morrisons today and be mugged differently.
Easy comparison – price per unit
You should also be able to compare prices between brands and between package sizes – to see, for example, what saving you'd make buying a large-size box of breakfast cereal instead of a small box.
To help you do this, all products must be marked not only with the selling price, but also the price per unit – for example, the price per kilo or per litre. This information must be understandable, easy to read, and easily identifiable.
This rule also applies to adverts that mention a selling price.
Notice this does not apply uniformly since it delegates to national regulations, so e.g. IIRC in Italy supermarkets list the number of "bits" you can rip off a toilet paper roll, but in Hungary they don't.
> Store's own brand is like 20-30% cheaper across the board. How is this even possible?
No need for marketing costs. Also companies compete for shelf space (sometimes they will have to pay to have their products placed in a favorable spot).
Also they buy BULK. When (e.g. Tesco) buys bread they issue the recipe they want and they guarantee LARGE volumes.
Regarding the comparisons, in EU they got labels that give you cost per 100ml or 100gr or per item.
Also a quality of such cheaper own brands is lower. Tesco Value is garbage, but they have premium brands which are not cheaper than popular external brands and with decent quality.
And I have a feeling they intentionally increase price of other brands to force people to buy store's brands.
The unit issue is in the EU. You can't sell everything by 100 g or 100 mL, so it is ultimately up to the seller. Another example of it is toilet paper, sometimes given in money/square, sometimes given in money/length.
You can't use that to detect shrinkflation unless you remember the old price per unit, right?
Some NZ supermarkets have that kind of labelling, but not always for every product.
My regular (soon to be former) cereal has gone from 700g to 620g to 535g in about 3 months, all for the same price. The box has the same width and height, but the depth has been shrinking.
It seems that the proposal from South Korea is different though, because it will show a before-after comparison, which isn't required in Europe. So I don't know for you, but I personally don't remember what's the per kg price of every single product I buy. If it increased and all other products increased too, I will not have any reference point.
It still helps, though, unless the shrinkflation hits the shelves for all competing products at the same time. If one brand starts with a higher per unit price, they will lose some customers comparing the per unit price with other brands.
This is great, but who the hell remembers what the price per litre was the last time they bought shampoo? This does not make it trivial to track shrinkflation at all. This is for comparing products that are currently on the shelf.
We have the same in the UK. On rare occasions there is a bad comparison between two products, one will be per kg and the other per item, but otherwise it's a great system.
The problem in the US is that food/ag corporations are powerful and always fight against this kind of consumer information. Same with ingredient and nutrition labelling. They want the consumer to have as little information as possible (information asymmetry is the term in economics).
It may not be a law here in the US, but most stores do it anyway. Meijer, Kroger, Walmart all have per-unit prices in a corner of the tag. Most of the time, sale prices have them too.
See also: Cadbury (UK) after they were bought by Kraft (US). I don't buy their products any more. A 150yo family company ruined in less than a geneation.
The main issue with this is that nobody I know shops by price per unit. Once the item with the new price per unit is out few people will remember the old one.
Doesn't help detect changed ingredients that lower quality, though.
I thought this was a EU thing, but a quick search suggests that maybe it's something specific to us?