Supermarket abuse of pricing?

Or get hold of a random barcode for someone elses' card, use that for discounts and give them the points whilst also messing up any possible data mining. There should be somewhere that allows you to upload your bardcode for your rewards cards to allow people to do this (where the code can't be used to claim stuff obviously)

Might register - www. scanmy code.co.uk :D

EDIT: broken the link as it has become registered since I posted
 
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So, for example, Nectar require an email address to be real (get one from gmail) and an address to send the card to (use your work or a friend). They will accept any name, title and DOB. What GDPR are you giving away here?

They are using your data for shopping analysis. To give you offers based on your previous baskets in the hope of keeping you as a customer instead of you shopping around. I've worked extensively with supermarkets over the last two decades (I helped with the launch of Nectar) and I can tell you that this is not some interest in your personal information, just interest in your money.
 
LuckyBenski said:
I think some people in this thread aren't that up to date/ haven't understood what's changed recently.

Now, the £3 meal deal is £3.50 without a loyalty card. Big ticket (for a supermarket) items can cost £1 or more extra without a card. It's not just the classic mild discounts, they're heavily penalising people for not using one. It's really frustrating to pop into the nearest shop on my work lunch break and find I'm not entitled to the meal deal or regular prices for stuff.

I've legitimately walked away when I've seen I'll be charged an extra quid over this. It's not pennies.
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Requoting as it nails the situation. Supermarkets are turning the himans right of food into a cartel extortion racket.
 
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LuckyBenski said:
I think some people in this thread aren't that up to date/ haven't understood what's changed recently.

Now, the £3 meal deal is £3.50 without a loyalty card. Big ticket (for a supermarket) items can cost £1 or more extra without a card. It's not just the classic mild discounts, they're heavily penalising people for not using one. It's really frustrating to pop into the nearest shop on my work lunch break and find I'm not entitled to the meal deal or regular prices for stuff.

I've legitimately walked away when I've seen I'll be charged an extra quid over this. It's not pennies.
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Actually, that part I don't have a problem with. I just will not be buying those items, period.

The problem is that they don't tell you the cost per weight size percentage when it is on a club card price.

So you can't compare the same item in a different size whether it is better value with a club card discount at a glance, not without doing some mental arithmetic. By law they need to show that, and they do....but not on the club card price.

That's the bigger issue for me.
 
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Raymond Lin said:
Actually, that part I don't have a problem with. I just will not be buying those items, period.

The problem is that they don't tell you the cost per weight size percentage when it is on a club card price.

So you can't compare the same item in a different size whether it is better value with a club card discount at a glance, not without doing some mental arithmetic. By law they need to show that, and they do....but not on the club card price.

That's the bigger issue for me.
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That sounds like a slippery slope too!
 
NickK said:
Requoting as it nails the situation. Supermarkets are turning the himans right of food into a cartel extortion racket.
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How are they extorting you? Give them some fake data, get a card, get cheaper food. Or go to Lidl and Aldi that don't do this (yet) and have 17% market share.

The £3 deal going up to £3.50 is about right considering food inflation at the moment. The price staying £3 for Clubcard holders is the deal not the £3.50 being a rip-off.

In general the big four supermarkets (Tesco, Sainsbury's, Asda and Morrisons) all work on unbelievably low margins - around 4%. Net margins are tiny. In 2023, Sainsburys turned over £35bn and made an after tax profit of £207m. That's 0.57%.

If they are operating as a cartel, they're making very little money out of it.
 
MikeTimbers said:
get cheaper food.
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It's not cheaper food. It's the regular price, that's the whole point. The "regular" price is then inflated to encourage you to use your loyalty card.


I did find myself wondering a while back what the effects of this will be. They clearly think they're on to something but the reality is that as as consumber I still look at elevated prices. Yes I don't have to pay them or can avoid them with a loyalty card, but the fact is that they're still there. My overall perception is that things have gotten ridiculously expensive recently but when actually looking a bit closer, the prices aren't that bad, they're just showing elevated prices to encourage card use. The subconscious perception for me is that these prices are getting ridiculous and it's making me think twice about where to shop. This could actually have an adverse effect on them, and not for the reasons they think it will.
 
Clubcard is one of the better schemes in my experience anyway, at least you're getting the money off there and then rather than solely earning points which then need to be converted to vouchers as with Asda and Sainsburys/Nectar (though you do get that benefit with Clubcard too). It's a shame they've reduced the value of the vouchers with Clubcard Partners though, used to get 3x the value for Disney+ for example which was a great deal, now it's 2x.
 
Diddums said:
It's not cheaper food. It's the regular price, that's the whole point. The "regular" price is then inflated to encourage you to use your loyalty card.


I did find myself wondering a while back what the effects of this will be. They clearly think they're on to something but the reality is that as as consumber I still look at elevated prices. Yes I don't have to pay them or can avoid them with a loyalty card, but the fact is that they're still there. My overall perception is that things have gotten ridiculously expensive recently but when actually looking a bit closer, the prices aren't that bad, they're just showing elevated prices to encourage card use. The subconscious perception for me is that these prices are getting ridiculous and it's making me think twice about where to shop. This could actually have an adverse effect on them, and not for the reasons they think it will.
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Trust me, the number crunchers are well aware of these possibilities of things and are monitoring them closely (one of my ex-colleagues heads up the data and analytics for Tesco Club Card), as it stands, any customer churn they are seeing is not enough to outweigh the retention they get through people opting in to use the loyalty scheme.

MOST consumers are lazy and don't care, as long as they get it cheaper.
 
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I don't think many of you understand how supermarkets work or how data works. Or competition for that matter.

The supermarkets are the latest scapegoat for society's ills. The papers are all making a big deal about unfair supermarket pricing etc. That they are making a huge profit out of fuel. My local Sainsbury's fuel is cheaper than anywhere around it. So how are they the ones to attack rather than Shell, or BP?

The competition between the big four and the German discounters is seriously intense.

Aldi and Lidl work on the basis of buying x as cheaply as possible by buying vast quantities of it thru very aggressive purchasing models. They then add a very low margin to x and sell it as fast as possible. They have no shareholders so the profits only need to be enough to satisfy the families that own them. Aldi pays well but their staff are expected to work unbelievably hard.

The big four work on sales margins rather than purchase margins but it has the same effect. All four now attempt to match Aldi's prices while also having to pay shareholders. Staff are paid relatively poorly compared to Aldi/Lidl but there are more staff.

Bottom line is that the high cost of food these days is not because of the sellers but because of the costs to produce food having gone up because of Brexit affecting agricultural labour costs, Ukraine affecting fertiliser and animal feed costs, and energy costs for every part of the supply chain including the stores themselves.
 
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Glad I'm not the only one who walks around a supermarket miffed at the prices :cry:

Thing that winds me up is the quality of the "fresh" fruit, vege and meat. Its not uncommon for things like onions and garlic to be off in the middle and fruit to go off in a matter of days. Tomatoes also tasteless which means they have snapped frozen them before being ripe.

Been trying different sources for fresh food. A website called Field and flower for my meats have been good in quality especially the chicken and did give oddbox a go but the quality has gone down hill in the last few months.
 
MikeTimbers said:
The £3 deal going up to £3.50 is about right considering food inflation at the moment. The price staying £3 for Clubcard holders is the deal not the £3.50 being a rip-off.

In general the big four supermarkets (Tesco, Sainsbury's, Asda and Morrisons) all work on unbelievably low margins - around 4%. Net margins are tiny. In 2023, Sainsburys turned over £35bn and made an after tax profit of £207m. That's 0.57%.

If they are operating as a cartel, they're making very little money out of it.
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MikeTimbers said:
I don't think many of you understand how supermarkets work or how data works. Or competition for that matter.

The supermarkets are the latest scapegoat for society's ills. The papers are all making a big deal about unfair supermarket pricing etc. That they are making a huge profit out of fuel. My local Sainsbury's fuel is cheaper than anywhere around it. So how are they the ones to attack rather than Shell, or BP?

The competition between the big four and the German discounters is seriously intense.

Aldi and Lidl work on the basis of buying x as cheaply as possible by buying vast quantities of it thru very aggressive purchasing models. They then add a very low margin to x and sell it as fast as possible. They have no shareholders so the profits only need to be enough to satisfy the families that own them. Aldi pays well but their staff are expected to work unbelievably hard.

The big four work on sales margins rather than purchase margins but it has the same effect. All four now attempt to match Aldi's prices while also having to pay shareholders. Staff are paid relatively poorly compared to Aldi/Lidl but there are more staff.

Bottom line is that the high cost of food these days is not because of the sellers but because of the costs to produce food having gone up because of Brexit affecting agricultural labour costs, Ukraine affecting fertiliser and animal feed costs, and energy costs for every part of the supply chain including the stores themselves.
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You keep trying to bring logic and sense to this discussion. Please don't get in the way of people wanting to rant at someone/something :cry:
 
Doggie2k said:
Glad I'm not the only one who walks around a supermarket miffed at the prices :cry:

Thing that winds me up is the quality of the "fresh" fruit, vege and meat. Its not uncommon for things like onions and garlic to be off in the middle and fruit to go off in a matter of days. Tomatoes also tasteless which means they have snapped frozen them before being ripe.

Been trying different sources for fresh food. A website called Field and flower for my meats have been good in quality especially the chicken and did give oddbox a go but the quality has gone down hill in the last few months.
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My local Lidl is awful for fresh fruit and veg. Sweaty carrots, rubbish tasteless apples, berries that are almost always going off etc. I think they might have a storage/transport issue.

It's slightly cheaper, but the quality difference between the local Sainsbury's is pretty massive. All the fruit and veg from there is massively better.
 
Rob_B said:
Or get hold of a random barcode for someone elses' card, use that for discounts and give them the points whilst also messing up any possible data mining. There should be somewhere that allows you to upload your bardcode for your rewards cards to allow people to do this (where the code can't be used to claim stuff obviously)

Might register - www. scanmycode .co.uk :D
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Ok...who ACTUALLY just registered that site?... :D

Hopefully a bot picked it up as it saw it mentioned, nice use of a tenner whoever owns that bot! Maybe I should instead use www.xn57pplgdgree555n4530.com
 
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I have someone else's tesco card so when I visit infrequently I don't feel like I'm getting more mugged.

Didn't realise I could add it to my phone so have now done so, thanks! More amazingly I've added my National Trust card...
 
Ayahuasca said:
Just LOL if you shop in a supermarket, noobs.
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well Occado still isn't making money from today's reports



101 ways to maliciously use someone elses QR code -
stock up on products which you can only buy a limited quantity of
Would Dexter find a use
where is the most geographically remote Tesco's
 
Jono8 said:
My local Lidl is awful for fresh fruit and veg. Sweaty carrots, rubbish tasteless apples, berries that are almost always going off etc. I think they might have a storage/transport issue.

It's slightly cheaper, but the quality difference between the local Sainsbury's is pretty massive. All the fruit and veg from there is massively better.
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Yeah dont know if its a london thing but my local tesco is the worst for it, sainsbury's is alright but is usually light on stock.
 
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