How can they sell this food so cheaply?

Spongbong

We buy a lot of food from a little shop attached to a poultry processing factory. We get stuff like whole chickens for £2 and Morrisons labelled ready meals marked £6 that only cost 50p.

I'm just wondering, does anyone know how these places can afford to sell this food so cheaply? Is there some reason it can't be sold full price in the intended supermarket?

Many thanks.

DCFC79

Less wages for staff, less overheads due to being open less hours, purely speculation as you can only confirm what hours they're open and how many staff work in the shop,

globalds

Because it is a sideline to the manufacturing business.

It is either surplus stock. For example they have an order from Marks and Spencer for 10,000 Chicken Jalfrezi's . The line runs and there are still trays full of stock left over ..This would either be dumped or placed in a store for staff and locals ...The money has already been made on the run anything else is a bonus....

The individual chickens could sell for a staggeringly low price and still make a small profit as none of the usual overheads and margins are involved.

geordie_joe

This just shows how much the supermarkets are adding on to the price. They are probably buying them for 50p each, or even less as they are buying in bulk, then hiking the price up to £6.

This is because they have huge overheads, shop floor staff, managers, HR dep, H&S, accounts, marketing, advertising, TV adverts to pay for, big stars to advertise their stores, fines to pay when they get caught being naughty, shareholders to pay dividends to, head office staff, IT department.........the list goes on and on.

The cost of all that lot, and more, has to be added to the cost of the item, putting it up from 50p to £6.

Yet they con us by increasing the price of the item in their store by the same percentage the price of the raw ingredients goes up.

So, for example, they buy rice at 5p per bag and sell it for £1 per bag. Then the price of rice goes up 20%, making it 6p per bag instead of 5p per bag. So they announce the price of rice has risen by 20% and put the price of their bags of rice up to £1.20.

eleanor73

Lucky you-would love a shop like that near me!

~Jem~

It's an offer to get customers in the shop in the hope they will then buy other stuff.

thatguy1

tbh, it's probably stuff that isn't up to top quality so they can't send it to the shops. so they sell it cheaply instead of throwing it away.

dlusman

Spongbong wrote: »

We buy a lot of food from a little shop attached to a poultry processing factory. We get stuff like whole chickens for £2 and Morrisons labelled ready meals marked £6 that only cost 50p.
.

so are you going to tell us where this is or keep it secret ?

threemuttleys

Could be that (along with the other points mentioned) that the chickens are raised as cheaply as possible (ie crammed into sheds in their thousands, made to grow to the point that they cannot walk)

juno

It might be that it can't be sold for full price because the labelling isn't quite right - even if you don't notice there could be a minor mistake, or they printed the wrong manufacturer details etc.

judeee

Years ago I used to work in a big discount supermarket (Job Lot, it was called, think they only had them in the North East), and a lot of stuff we sold was either almost coming up to it's sell by date or it was surplus stock. A lot. Not everything though, we did get a few new lines in of things that were selling for loads more in the main supermarkets, e.g Terry's used to have this chocolate thing, kind of like a Creme Egg, but triangle shaped and filled with mint, and it was called a Pyramint! Anyway, in every other shop these cost quite a bit (I think RRP was about 69p!), but we sold stacks of the things for like 10p, which basically just shows how much supermarkets mark their prices up because we sold everything for about a quarter of the price or even less, and my boss didn't seem short of a bob or two!

Mmm...I wish they still sold Pyramints...