Harringay, Haringey - So Good they Spelt it Twice!
The Great Flapjack Scandal at Sainsburys
The local Sainsbury is so full of BOGOFs (buy one get one free) and other, often specious, "OFFERS" that one could be forgiven for thinking you could come out of the store with more money than you went in with.
So much of their merchandising – AKA confusion marketing – seems aimed at disguising higher prices and frustrating price comparisons.
The best example of this I've seen is their flapjacks, near the far corner of the store. These used to be priced at £1 for six slices, in a plastic tray.
The company has managed to hold the price at £1 but, there's a big but: the contents are dramatically reduced. Where once there were six slices, now there are only three.
In effect, the price is nearly doubled.
In order to help disguise the extent of the value reduction, the three, slightly larger slices are now separated in a redesigned tray that features two ridges that space out the slices more widely. Less contents, more packaging, same price. Does this amount to deceit?
More generally, weights & measures (that aid price comparisons) on most products are as hard to find as ever, often in tiny print and/or are deeply hidden.
Tags for Forum Posts: Sainsburys, comparison, confusion, flapjacks, marketing, price
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Clive Carter on
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Hat's off to you John for going to the trouble of deleting your last post and replacing it with a corrected past participle of bear
– The Bourne Identity ;-)
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Permalink Reply by Peter L. Bailey on
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Thanks everyone - I've learned a lot of new things from this discussion! Very interesting. Also I was in a sandwich shop in Birmingham yesterday and they had this quote on the wall:
"There is hardly anything in the world that some man cannot make a little worse and sell a little cheaper, and the people who consider price only are this man's lawful prey" (John Ruskin)
...although obviously this doesn't take account of the fact that much though we might want to buy the expensive and tasty food, sometimes we have to settle for the cheap and less tasty food in order to afford enough of it to eat.
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This is not about price only.
It's about the disguising of value and real price and its role in frustrating price comparison.
In the flapjack example, I said earlier that it would have been more honest for Sainsbury just to increase the price to maintain their desired margin, than to keep the price exactly at one pound, nearly halve the contents and expand the packaging. What Sainsbury did enables them increase the effective price by far more than a simple sticker price increase that would have been more noticeable – and more honest.
Increasing the price isn't welcome, but it would have been preferable to deceitful conduct.
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Isn't this what happens with chocolate bars too? The price stays (more or less) the same, sometimes even the size of the wrapper. But choccy bar gets smaller. They really were bigger when we were younger!
Here look: http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/bills/article-1676971/Mars-bar-s...
And this talks about more than just choccy bars: http://conversation.which.co.uk/consumer-rights/shrinking-curly-wur...
So I'm with you on the deceitful conduct angle, truly. But it ain't just Sainsbury's is it? Its everything*, everywhere, all the time. People want to make money out of other people by selling them more stuff for more money (or failing that, less stuff for the same money). I would love to say its the crazy modern profit-worshipping world we live in but its probably been happening since Captain Caveman sold Fred Flintstone a nice bit of rock.
(* with plenty of honourable exceptions, obviously)
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Pete, I'm not opposed the profit motive.
It is the profit motive that has built the world we live in today. Capitalism, as Marx acknowledged, is the most powerful wealth generator we have ever seen. Capitalism promises little and delivers massively. Perhaps its best example is in the last 20 years in 'Communist' China.
But unfettered, capitalism leads to wrongs and unfairness. Successive governments (including the present one) have failed to impose meaningful control on the conduct of banks and this country is paying a high price for that.
Free and fair competition is a good thing. In the case of Sainsburys (and other home-grown chains), their disguising of price and value is leading to less competition, not more, by frustrating easy price comparison and making life harder for consumers.
This is often seen in established players in a market and Sainsbury's are far from alone. For example, confusion-marketing is practised by British Telecom and energy companies. Sadly, regulation is slack in all these cases and it is embodied in weak regulators, from Ofcom to the Bank of England.
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Permalink Reply by Hugh on
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Moved from another thread:
Reply by Rachella
You seem to be doing a better job of fact-checking than the Hornsey Journal if it just picked the story up from Harringay Online without checking sources. Speaking of sloppy journalism, I just read an article in the Haringey Independent that was simply a rehash of the Sainsbury's pricing conversation on HOL.
I'm not sure whether the editor saw it and pulled it because he was stung by your comment, or they didn't want to link to HoL or whether it was something else altogether.
I'm not persuaded of there being "no real news content" or lack of "newsworthiness".
Radio 4's The World at One recently visited the Community Cafe in the Haringey MIND building – they interviewed a number of patrons on the subject – the rising cost of food.
15,000+ hits in a few days indicates an unusual level of interest in a subject (certainly beyond Harringay alone).
I think the account of HI story-pulling underlines the importance of independent online fora – including Harringayonline. We see some local print press retrenching and others, possibly pulling stories for fear of offending advertisers.
It begs the question: who is independent and who's looking after community interests?
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I hope not, but don't you think it's important to understand the basis on which your local newspaper (your local piece of the Fourth Estate) makes editorial decisions?
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Permalink Reply by aidan on
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Oh absolutely. I'm just not sure his boss would be so keen on transparency in this case.
Interesting to think about the implications of sites such as this making newspapers redundant online, on top of news sites making print redundant. I suspect HoL is far closer to the future model of journalism than our local papers are.
Have you ever had a buy-out offer from a paper? (Would you say if you had?)
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I like to think that there's plenty of space for both 'heritage media' and more community based sites like HoL in a local media ecosystem.
Some community sites (commonly referred to as 'hyperlocal') are blog-based and pretty much follow the journalism model. In many cases they refer to themselves as citizen journalists or community reporters. There are +'s and -'s to that model vs traditional journalism which I won't go into here.
However, I chose a platform which focusses on community content but leaves space for me to curate other web content and add my own voice. The focus on connecting and amplifying the voices of the many rather than just augmenting those of a few is a very direct expression of what I believe the web can be so effective at locally.
It seems that at least one of the big local newspaper groups may be convinced, since they've just bought a 50% share in newish Facebook-like platform that was developed, according to the owners, with more than a nod to HoL. It provides a national forum to connect you with others in your area. It serves a purpose by filling a gap where's there's nothing else. Its business model however is to gather as much personal data about you as possible and to sell that to businesses. As a national platform it also has no local input. So for me it misses much of the point of hyperlocal as well as its spirit.
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Its business model however is to gather as much personal data about you as possible and to sell that to businesses.
... which is also most of the reason behind Nectar cards, that are asked for at almost every checkout.
Knowing my buying habits – or lack thereof – Sainsburys recently sent me a voucher for £4 off, usable if I was to spend more than £20. I had to think about this GREAT OFFER for only a few seconds before casting it into the bin. Their prices are so much higher to begin with.
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