£1 stores - Just how do they make their money?
- Thread starter psd99
- Start date
Soldato
There was a program on channel 4 or 5 a couple of years ago about Pound stretchers i think it was. They buy the stuff that the major supermarkets cancel from the manufacturers, or say they want 10 pallets of Lynx and then change their order to 6 pallets, the discount stores get offered the remaining stock for peanuts.
Soldato
I can remember paying 1.70 for a pint of Carling and 60p for a litre of petrol and Im only in my thirties. In the eighties 20 cigarettes were 2 quid, a can of coke was 25p and a mars bar was 14 and 1/2p
Over the last 20 years on average prices doubled
I can remember paying 1.70 for a pint of Carling and 60p for a litre of petrol and Im only in my thirties. In the eighties 20 cigarettes were 2 quid, a can of coke was 25p and a mars bar was 14 and 1/2p
Over the last 20 years on average prices doubled
That's nothing. I can remember a pint been 14 1/2 pence and you got change from a pound note for 6 pints!
Fish chips and peas for under a quid.
Equally I can remember cigs been under two quid though I started smoking late in life but can still remember myself and a mate whinging for an hour in a flash nightclub having to pay £3 for 16 cigs.
I can remember coke as been 10p a tin as well and crisps been under 10p a bag (and you got way more in them back then)
ALthough downsides is I can remember interest rates been 14.5% when I had loans and no savings and now its the other way round, interest rates are at a all time low
Some things like technology gets cheaper. My mate bought a top loading vhs video recorder for £850 and my first pc which was a Intel DX-50 cpu, 4 Mb ram, 80Mb hard drive, 3x cd rom reader, Tseung labs 1Mb graphics card and a 15" screen cost me £1,700 plus VAT.
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Thats not true, I bought a can of coke in a B&M went into to see what they sold, 39p and the date on the bottom is Aug 11, in Spar they sell the same can for 79p
Soldato
How long before this happens?
In 1990 you could walk into a bank and get fixed savings account for 5 years at 10% each year. Now they wont even cover inflation, do not fix rates now unless you have a mortgage then of course do..
In the seventies we had inflation at 30% for a while.
4% is already below the actual 5% happening.
If things happen how Im expecting, we should see the 20 quid pint by about 2019, I recommend getting the drinks in now
That's just rip off prices though. My local co-op is currently selling tins of coke for 28p each and they will be making a profit.
79p is almost drink vending machine prices. Even my pizza takeaway only charges 60p for a tin of coke.
But fair point about the date thing though.
As a starting point now of £3.00 per pint and say we remain at 4% inflation then it will take 50 years for it to be £20.00.
Of course, duty tends to be increased on booze so it will be less time than that.
Interestingly enough in 100 years it will be £145 per pint.
If wages keep up with inflation and based on £24,000 as the average wage today, in 50 years when a pint is £20 it will be £164,000 per annum.
Economies tend to go in cycles tho or even reset themselves through various means i.e. war or revolution, I suspect things will look quite different in 50 years time compared to today financially but probably not hyper inflation.
True but I only used 4% in my calcs and ignored Hyper Inflation.
Chances are we will have knocked a zero off all our notes by then as who wants a pound coin as your smallest coin?
In saying that, perhaps money would have ceased to exist by 50 years and everything would be electronic.
Anyway looking back the average wage in 1960 was £948 per annum so it's now over 24 times as much in 50 years.
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Soldato
In USA they still have dollar bills worth even less. They could save 5bn a year in wasted paper but dont want to upset the cotton farmers who benefit from the waste
Money will probably be electronic fairly soon I think, coins will be like cheques for when your battery runs out
hyper is triple digit inflation I think so I'd not expect that much either. UK has like 1 trillion of debt but its average term to expire is 13 years which means a collapse in value of money linked to our credit worthiness is unlikely. Even ConDems could pull us out of a dive in time
USA however has a 4 year term on its debt and 14 trillion of it increasing by another 1.5 a year, they are in world of trouble. Guess who is the 3rd largest holder of USA debt/money...
Money will probably be electronic fairly soon I think, coins will be like cheques for when your battery runs out
hyper is triple digit inflation I think so I'd not expect that much either. UK has like 1 trillion of debt but its average term to expire is 13 years which means a collapse in value of money linked to our credit worthiness is unlikely. Even ConDems could pull us out of a dive in time
USA however has a 4 year term on its debt and 14 trillion of it increasing by another 1.5 a year, they are in world of trouble. Guess who is the 3rd largest holder of USA debt/money...
Associate
I use Alibaba et al and am well aware of how it all works - but we're talking about different things. You go on and try and buy Lynx shower gel etc from one of those sites. They're fine if you want speciality items (we get custom educational products made to order) or generics, but how are you going to get branded items from them?
Because the wholesaler is allowed to sell branded goods - i.e. the supply chain has been followed. You can't buy Lynx shower gel from the same factory wherever it is made and have it branded as Lynx, it has got to be sold through Unilever or rather a Unilever licensed distributor. Whilst Poundland etc does sell a fair bit of generics, the stuff they sell the most of is the branded stuff, because ultimately the customer thinks they're getting a bargain.
Yep, all the factories on a river and you cruise along and stop off to 'shop'.
Again, just to reiterate, you try and go direct to China and try and buy Imperial Leather soap, Radox shower gel, Haribo sweets, Quavers, 'known brand' toys etc direct from the manufacturer.
The only thing we used to get from China were the generic tools and the like, but even then the costs/savings often didn't make sense for the extra work/risk/complexity involved.
No, not at all - you've got to be dealing in much higher volumes for the smaller price items. Who wants a warehouse full of a 100-200k bars of soap which would take 5-10 years to shift? Sure, ultimately you might lose out on a few grand, but you're not stuck with a shed load of soap that you can't shift.
Of course, at those margins is where it starts making sense. But if I could get a product off a UK wholesaler for 0.5p per unit more, why would I bother trying to source it from the Far East? Unless I was dealing in hundreds of thousands of units, would it be worth it?
Soldato
Sorry just to make it clear, I wasn't referring to the branded goods like Lynx and Coke as I agree, you buy them wholesale in the UK.
In a lot of the one pound cheapo shopds round where I live it is also full of cheap chinese toys and other goods.
It's them I was referring to buying them direct.
As you say though, it's down to volumes. Yes we save £15 on an item we might only order 100 max per year of that item so it's a £1,500 saving. However if you had a chain of pound shops and you were saving 0.5p per item by buying direct but you were buying 300,000 units you would save £1,500 as well.
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Greebo, can I ask what you do?
In my local, I pay £1.55 a pint.
Company accountant for a engineering company which specialises in hygenic stainless steel components for the food industry.
Tell me about it! The last Chelsea shirt I bought from there with a name/number on the back was Shevchenko, complete with Prem badges, etc.
Bought for about £60-70, he played mostly crap, sold on eBay for £30.
