Top Rip Offs 2024...

[Matt.GC]

The biggest rip off in this country. The supermarket loyalty scheme.

Listen, the supermarkets. If I can save that much on lurpak just by having a loyalty scheme, it obviously doesn't need to be that price in the first.

While we are at it. Surely prices can actually come down a bit. As a procurement manager, I can see trade prices are falling, so why are we still footing the bill, whilst seeing you earn hundreds of millions in profits

The second time I've raised this, and I'm not condoning some of the behaviours these companies have been involved in (every company and it's actions should be scrutinised), but food retailers "profiteering" from inflation is not only a false narrative spread by the media and politicians alike (there's an academic article that traces this behaviour back to 1995), but the opposite is actually true.

The Competition Commission have investigated, and found as what should have been widely known to all (especially known by Wal Mart and Carrefour, the 2 biggest supermarkets in the world who have both pulled out of the UK having not cracked it) that UK grocery retailing is the most competitive in the entire world. UK consumers enjoy access to some of the lowest priced food in the world (some countries do fair better). They're actually sacrificing margins to keep prices down, and this is very clear in their annual reports. These margins are as low as 1.8%. That's almost bordering on break even.

Other than nationalisation, I'm unsure what anyone else wants them to do? Other than banks, the UK based ones in particular (who pay all their taxes here) operate under more public scrutiny and hostility than most other businesses, they get investigated constantly, politicians hate them, newspapers hate them (not afforded at all to their German based rivals), they've removed 32% of their staffing hours over the last 16 years to keep prices down whilst UK-wide productivity has flatlined, and 3 of them in particular are in financial trouble, or have been in the past decade. They're taxed and regulated heavily, far more than foreign online competitors, and committing certain crimes against them has now practically been legalised.

Regarding "loyalty" cards, they're almost totally about data collection and insights. The lower pricing, sometimes on products the retailer then looses money on, is offered in return for your data. Online retailers and social media companies have this on tap, and in far greater detail. They can personalise adverts and recommendations to you all the time, much harder for bricks and mortar retailers to do. So these schemes are a way of profiling you and gaining insights into your habits through physical store sales channels. It's access to Big Data analytics whilst still retaining an old school physical retail presence. I can't see how anyone who happily uses unethical companies like Twitter or Amazon could have a too much of a problem with them attempting to level the playing field.

As for Aldi, the undeserved darlings of the industry (also has inferior stores to Lidl, are more secretive, and a more exploitative employer), you can bet your life on a similar scheme being in the works. They won't be without them for long I can assure you of that.

 

[Shaggy_Dog_]

I love aldi, especially because they don no have a loyalty card.
Proud to say I do not have a single one of the damn things.
Scrapped Tesco on value, service and standards for aldi a decade ago.

Lidl seem to recently have launched a stealth “Lidl Plus” price on some items when scanning the Lidl Plus app at checkout. That app is a pain in the backside by the way, I always find that the exact time you find that it needs to be updated and can’t be used is until then is when you are stood at the checkout about to pay for your shopping with a long queue behind you.

 

[GooseOnTheLoose]

food retailers "profiteering" from inflation is not only a false narrative

The key point Matt is making here may go unnoticed, so I wanted to highlight it. He is absolutely bang on that food retailers aren't profiteering from inflation. The "greedflation" profits, we do often talk about, are being made by the handful of conglomerates who manufacture our food.

Nestlé, Pepsico, Coca-Cola, Unilever, Danone, General Mills, Kellogg's, Mars, Associated British Foods, and Mondelez pretty much own the entire market. Their profits have not crashed.

The traditional supermarkets make their profits in other ways. They charge eye watering amounts to different companies for preferential placement in their stores. They sell sales and customer data back to manufacturers. They sell additional services and products, to subsidise the food side. They diversify as much as possible.

Amazon does not make a profit on its retail business and never has, it possibly never will. It makes a huge profit on its Web Services division and market place services though.

Profit is rarely made on the first transaction, or the item on the face of it. Profit is made by additional spend, which is why Aramark at Merlin is a bit of a head scratcher, but short term cash injections and all...

 

[Shaggy_Dog_]

The £2 bus fare cap in England is to rise to £3 ( you live in London where it’s capped at £1.75 or Greater Manchester which will stay at £2).

Seems pretty counter productive to raise the price cap to £3 like that if part of the idea of it was to get more people using public transport rather than driving and that’s quite a jump after people have got used to paying £2 for the last few years.

 

[Benzin]

That would, end up with me more likely to drive into town to play warhammer than bus, since the car park next door is currently slightly more expensive.

Though no doubt car parks will increase rates again. And councils/governments will ponder why no one visits the high street anymore.

 

[rob666]

Come on now, people are avoiding the high street because of the internet, not because of a quid on bus fares.

 

[GooseOnTheLoose]

Shopping malls, supermarkets, out of town retail parks and (as @rob666 pointed out) online retailers are the reason why the high street went into decline. No one visits them anymore because there's nothing to visit on it.

What we ought to keep in mind though is that the £2/£3 bus cap is, in effect, a government subsidy to a private bus company. It's not tied to performance and it hasn't led to further investment in the sector. In reality the bus prices are still the same as they've always been, and the bus companies are seeing higher profits and better returns. I have mixed feelings about the cap, as someone who can't drive and relies on public transport. It's sort of been beneficial for my wallet, but only if I tap out on the bus (a concept I'm still not used to, having grown up in London). If I don't tap out I get charged £8 for the journey, which is ridiculous. Additionally only some services near me have opted in, and the most useful ones haven't, meaning it's still a £16 return bus journey to get to my closest city (multiple operators).

I'd feel better about the increase if I knew it was going to lead to a better service, or even nationalisation. In reality it's simply to alleviate a little bit of stress on the Chancellor's purse strings.

 

[Leigh]

I was expecting the cap to go entirely, so having a £3 cap instead is actually a nice surprise. I think the gov spending on the £2 cap was unsustainable anyway so £3 seems like an okay compromise.

The people using it every day probably have week/month long tickets anyway since they can come out cheaper (at least around here).

 

[Matt.GC]

It's mainly the internet that is killing most types of retail.

The High Street model was starting to look dated when out of town shopping and superstores came of age. Big out of town and superstore shopping is now also in serious decline itself, a relic of the 90's and 2000's.

I doubt an extra £1 on a bus fayre will make a single difference if your local High Street has already survived online shopping, parking charges, congestion/clean air charges, extortionate rates and rents, the virtual legalisation of shop theft, and the wider financial woes of the businesses that once typified them.

A group of hoodlums drinking 7.5% cans of cider outside a range of bordered up windows, hygienically questionable kebab restaurants, and 15 competing vape shops shouldn't be effected by this too much I would have thought.

I'm surprised at how cheap bus travel is compared to rail travel. Trains are absolutely extortionate! I'd love to use them more, but when the fare costs 6 times that of the diesel required in the car for the same journey?

 

[Thameslink Rail]

Alton Towers

 

[Poisson]

Alton Towers

Try Clacton Pavilion, as @Leigh and @Jonathan will back me up on.

 

[Burbs]

Seeing as school uniform discussion very much spiralled in here, I have moved all those posts into their own thread in the Corner Coffee section. Please continue discussion there.

https://towersstreet.com/talk/threads/school-uniform.7375/

Thanks!

 

[Jb85]

Alton Towers

I was just coming on to this topic to post this very thing.

It’s been a **** season. Such optimism- new rides on the horizon (literally) - entertainment, a director who engages with the community

Now it’s ending with - no Horizon, cuts, Blade going potentially…..
Yeh it’s bad.

 

[Alix]

School photos. Chimp’s latest lot were taken straight after PE so she’s looking a little flustered and harassed and yet they want £46 for 3 digital images!

For that sort of money I’d want her to be allowed to brush her hair and recover to her usual skin colour at the very least. You can buy 5 prints for £22 but I don’t need that many. I can’t order just one photo. Grrr. ORP are better value.

 

[Shaggy_Dog_]

School photos. Chimp’s latest lot were taken straight after PE so she’s looking a little flustered and harassed and yet they want £46 for 3 digital images!

For that sort of money I’d want her to be allowed to brush her hair and recover to her usual skin colour at the very least. You can buy 5 prints for £22 but I don’t need that many. I can’t order just one photo. Grrr. ORP are better value.

This has always peed me off as well, this stupid insistence school photographers have on selling packages of photos where you get a set of different size pictures you don’t really want rather than just selling individual prints at a realistic price. It gets worse when if you have more than one child because the prices start getting really silly. It’s 2024, no reason whatsoever that they can’t just let you pick and choose what you want on a website and then print it.

 

[BigShadowtinytree]

School photos. Chimp’s latest lot were taken straight after PE so she’s looking a little flustered and harassed and yet they want £46 for 3 digital images!

For that sort of money I’d want her to be allowed to brush her hair and recover to her usual skin colour at the very least. You can buy 5 prints for £22 but I don’t need that many. I can’t order just one photo. Grrr. ORP are better value.

It’s ridiculous isn’t it, I spent around £50-£60 for 6 prints this year. 3 prints of each kid, one for us, one for each set of grandparents. These photography companies know what they’re doing as well, it’s never good value just to order one copy (if they even allow it).

What also annoys me about the packages they do is you can never mix and match photos, say you have 2 or more kids at the same school, you couldn’t order a pack of 3 prints with pictures of your different kids, the pack of 3 has to be 3 of the same photo. So you either pay through the nose for one picture of each child, or through the nose for multiple packages.

I’m a sentimental mug so I paid it, but still. One thing that baffled me about my eldest daughters school photo is that her earrings have been airbrushed away, they were plain silver studs so nothing garish, perfectly inline with the school uniform rules. I thought it was a weird thing to do, no need to edit photos of children like that.

 

[Alix]

That is weird - I’ve never noticed any air brushing, chimp would probably like her post PE flush toned down

 

[DiogoJ42]

What are school photos even for these days? (Other than so the schools have a mugshot of every student to show to the police after the inevitable stabbings).

 

[Alix]

They use it on her profile in the school app… they flog them to parents… erm…
They’re a tradition though I think - grandparents like getting them anyway

 

[DiogoJ42]

They’re a tradition though I think - grandparents like getting them anyway

So was "wood / metal work for boys, typing and home ec. for girls." As well as a sound beating for "talking back" (or "correcting an adult's mistake about your guilt", as it's known outside schools).