Cheapest Pic 'n' Mix

Colxfile

Although I'm more of a biscuit man, I'm feeling urges for bags of pic 'n' mix sweets every now and again. The awakenings of childhood memories no doubt.

Until now, the only thing that stopped me giving in was the enormous difference in price between pic 'n' mix and just buying a bag of wine gums, marshmallows and so on.

Today, I noticed my local Wilkinsons is offering such an arrangement for... 49p / 100g. A minute's walk away into Woolworths, I see it offered for 62p / 100g.

Any advance on 49p/100g?

rachelandgromit

But have you every tried woolies pic n mix whereby you fill a £1.99 carton (think about the size of a medium soft drink carton at McDonalds).

Its £1.99 however much you can cram in and I think they do larger containers at about £2.99 which is the same principal, cram as much as you can!

Edinburghlass_2

Last year at Halloween Tesco instore had an offer on their pik n mix and despite me telling everyone who was around that they were cheaper buying that they still continued to pick up the bags of small bars of Mars etc :rolleyes:

Colxfile

rachelandgromit wrote:

But have you every tried woolies pic n mix whereby you fill a £1.99 carton (think about the size of a medium soft drink carton at McDonalds).

Its £1.99 however much you can cram in and I think they do larger containers at about £2.99 which is the same principal, cram as much as you can!

Short answer: No.

Long answer: Hmmmmmmmm.... errrrrrrrr..... (Repeat for 30 seconds)

Problem I have is that doing it by a carton is selling the sweets by volume, whereas selling by weight is just that. Unless I know (a) the capacity of a carton without it bending and distorting at all (There'll be some leeway beyond that for give, obviously) and (b) the density of the sweets I like (Especially those foam-and-jelly snakes mmmm...) it's tricky for me to do a direct comparison. For me, the first glance is that for a £1.99 carton in Woolies would need to hold about 400g of sweets for it to be competitive.

I think further investigation is needed here. :cool:

An afterthought, I remember years back on watchdog, there was a bit on how some of the paper bags given away with pic 'n' mix were heavy enough to add a couple of pence to the weight...

Smashing

Depends on what sweets you're after - my faves were always foam shrimps & banana's, but you can get a 350g bag of those in poundland or the 99p store.

bubbles_2

I was once educated in woolworths on how to fill the carton by a complete stranger expertly filling it! Its all about making sure all the gaps are filled with the smaller sweets according to the expert So stack big ones then fill the gaps with small and repeat with each layer. Common sense i guess but i hadnt really looked into it as thorougly previous to that!

sukysue

I always ask them to wegh it for me and we usually get nearly double the weight for the same price!!!Mind you we are greedy and not afraid to cram!

Colxfile

Okay, got in from Woolies. First of all, the price per weight wasn't 62p/100g: it's 65p/100g. :shocked: So, if you buy by weight, then you get a quarter more at Wilkinson's than you do at Woolies.

I've got the two cartons. Thanks to reading the underside of the cups, I didn't need to fill them with water or carry out complex calculations to discover their capacities: The smaller (£1.99) is a 22oz cup. That's about 640cm^3. The larger (£2.99) is a 32oz cup. That's about 950cm^3. As a direct volume / price comparison: using a smaller cup, a litre's worth of sweets wil set you back £3.11; using a larger cup, the same volume will set you back £3.15. Not a massive difference, but still...

I have to admit, mentions of how to correctly fill the cartons to minimise empty space make good sense to me; but

I neglected to do a weighing of my favourite sweets, though. So that'll have to wait for another day. (Or this afternoon) But reading a couple of the above posts does suggest to me that low density sweets (Such as marshmallows) are better off being bought by weight, whereas higher density ones are better off being bought by volume.

I may just have to spend some money to further this important scientific study.

ben500

Colxfile wrote:

Okay, got in from Woolies. First of all, the price per weight wasn't 62p/100g: it's 65p/100g. :shocked: So, if you buy by weight, then you get a quarter more at Wilkinson's than you do at Woolies.

I've got the two cartons. Thanks to reading the underside of the cups, I didn't need to fill them with water or carry out complex calculations to discover their capacities: The smaller (£1.99) is a 22oz cup. That's about 640cm^3. The larger (£2.99) is a 32oz cup. That's about 950cm^3. As a direct volume / price comparison: using a smaller cup, a litre's worth of sweets wil set you back £3.11; using a larger cup, the same volume will set you back £3.15. Not a massive difference, but still...

I have to admit, mentions of how to correctly fill the cartons to minimise empty space make good sense to me; but

I neglected to do a weighing of my favourite sweets, though. So that'll have to wait for another day. (Or this afternoon) But reading a couple of the above posts does suggest to me that low density sweets (Such as marshmallows) are better off being bought by weight, whereas higher density ones are better off being bought by volume.

I may just have to spend some money to further this important scientific study.

Whilst this post is thorough you have however forgotten to factor in the weight of the weevils, I'm sure this will only amount to a few pennies but nonetheless should be accounted for, unless of course you omitted this as they will however be consumed and could be therefore considered part of the consumable factoring.

cabra1

If you were buying the smarties on the
pick & mix they would work out good value
as these are heavy.
As for the Haribo jelly type you can get loads in
by squashing right down and filling right to the top.
We did this in a motorway services and got plenty
to go round four of us.

xzibit

you pay for pic 'n' mix?? :rotfl: