Check what you are paying for! Do the Math!

littlewillow

Wow people spend an awful amount of time 'marking' grammar and spelling on these boards.

I found this very interesting to read because I thought I had just made mistakes with my calculations when I have found things supposedly a better deal, but actually more expensive in multi-buys/big packs, or had given the supermarket the benefit of the doubt. However, I have found more and more that supermarkets are trying this with a wealth of different products.

Also around Shrove Tuesday I found small packs of flour on a "pancake day special shelf" (obviously containing all the typical buys for pancake day) for TWICE THE PRICE of massive bags found elsewhere in the shop. It is upsetting that it didn't really surprise me and I am sure we could find many more examples of this happening.

Also, often fruit and veg is cheaper if you buy it loose...I find it strange they don't provide scales when prices are listed by weight. It may be worth looking at the different weights between loose and bagged.

geordie_joe

aau98113 wrote: »

Thank you for taking some time out of cleaning the walls of your glass house to share your wisdom with us.

Ditto

aau98113 wrote: »

I suspect that the word you were looking for was "and" but I may be mistaken because anyone with a grasp of basic English skills would know not to start a sentence with a conjunction.

I totally agree with you.... Have you seen your post from a couple of days ago?

aau98113 wrote: »

Dont worry Decay, Some of us got it ;-)

Although i'll admit it ltook me a minute. I just kept thinking "damn, i have seen tbis in loads of shops but never price checked". And then i finally realised you were commenting on just the name and that i hadnt missed out on a deal afterall

aau98113 wrote: »

Why have you capitalised "Math"?

Because the OP did it in the title and in the text of the post, I was repeating/quoting what he/she wrote. If the op had of put it in italics I would have done the same.

aau98113 wrote: »

I would have been tempted to leave it all in lower case since it is not a proper noun.

I know it should be lower case, but I was repeating what someone else had wrote.

aau98113 wrote: »

I would also have put it in quotation marks if I was referencing something that someone else had said.

Don't be silly, look at your post I quoted above. You can't put one apostrophe where it is supposed to be, so you'd have no chance with a couple of quotation marks.

aau98113 wrote: »

I also believe you would have been better using "nation's" as opposed to "nations" since you are, afterall, talking about the English skills of the nation.

Normally I would, but as the op had used nations I did the same, because I assumed they didn't k now what apostrophes were.

aau98113 wrote: »

In summary I would have said:

Using the word "math" is insulting to the nation's English skills.

Only after practicing for an hour.

aau98113 wrote: »

There may even be further improvements to make on your sentence but i think I would score a little higher on a test with my effort.

Yes but you had practiced several times before posting it, in a test you would only get one go at it, and look how bad you do when you only have one go at it. No apostrophes, not one, capital letter (Some) after a comma, lower case word "I", starting a sentence with "And", misspellings and missed spaces between words!

I very much doubt you'd do better than me in a test.

aau1

Well played, Geordie Joe, well played.

You'll find that many (if not all) of my posts are grammatically incorrect somewhere. I hope you didn't waste more than 5 seconds looking for what you wanted because it shouldn't have taken you any longer than that.

That's because I use this site to converse informally and I didn't really give it much thought before now. I also use a tiny phone screen to connect most of the time which means I invariably have to correct a mis-spelling in every other word before I finally do submit a post because my vision gets blurry at night and my fingers are too fat for the keypad. You should see what my posts look like immediately after I've typed them out and before I go back and tidy them up to the point of being legible!

I freely admit to being imperfect. I am absolutely, totally, 100% a lazy user of the English language when it comes to posting on this site and I'm sorry if that causes offence to you or anyone else. I'm more interested in making my point and then getting on with reading the rest of the site. My point in this case was that your post was hypocritical and brought nothing to the topic of discussion.

Now can i just ask you, do you actually have anything relevant to the thread that you would lke to add? Anything at all? At least I contributed!

Stephen_Leak

littlewillow wrote: »

<snip>

Also, often fruit and veg is cheaper if you buy it loose...I find it strange they don't provide scales when prices are listed by weight. It may be worth looking at the different weights between loose and bagged.

I am seriously considering buying some fishing/luggage scales.

Lugh_Chronain

Instead of everyone bickering, why not come up with a solution of how to do the maths, or whatever you want to call it? Not everyone is au fait with maths, especially when it comes to price per unit, etc.

mySupermarket has a simple tool where you can sort the price by relevance, try opting for price per unit (low to high), this will outline the cheapest of whatever it is you're intending to purchase, the cheapest price will then appear first. It's amazing what you miss if you don't, I do this all the time now since mySupermarket revamped their website. OK, mySupermarket is a bit problematic at the moment (people complaining it's slower, and so on and so forth), nevertheless, this has helped me make better choices when it comes to prices of stuff I'm wanting to purchase.

I also requested help not so long ago on how to work out prices per grams, ml, kilos, liters, etc e.g. if something costs £2 for 250g then that would effectively cost 80p/100g. Nobody replied with a method on how to work this out though I did eventually find a tool that someone (no names mentioned) kindly pointed me to. The tool is called The Unit Price Calculator which helps you calculate and compare the unit price of your groceries and is also very simple to use, doesn't take much time to work out how it works either.

These methods appear to help when you're wanting to do a shop, though you might want to sort out the maths this way, as mentioned above, before going out to do your weekly shop or whatever.

I've also noticed things are getting smaller as the OP has pointed out, and more expensive too. The first time I noticed this was with cheese. Cathedral City Cheddar for example is now sold at 350g were before it used to be 400g. It can flummox you too. I was caught out a while ago thinking they were still selling this cheese in 400g, it wasn't until I got home when I noticed the difference in size. It was admittedly a BOGOF though the price per 100g was slightly more than I was expecting, it didn't exactly bankrupted me though was slightly annoying all the same.

Anyway, if anyone else can come up with any other solutions in the meantime then please do post it as it will be very helpful for all of us savvy savers.