Everyone lost in the Ether II

Dippydoo

LEJC wrote: »

not always Dippy...the words participating retailers is what you should go by...however if for example A accept the vouchers then it should be at all stores unless a sign is clearly displayed saying their individual store coupon policy differs

I took this query up with my local S that suddenly decided a few months back it was too much hassle to accept vouchers and that was basically the reply that I had from their HO

well thats what asda house told me

bubbs

LEJC wrote: »

Thats a really good point enterprise....Bubbs please let your insurance know but stress its for information only at this stage as it will make it easier if later on it has to go down the insurance route.

Also make sure you are the one to get a quote for fixing as the work needs to be of a good standard rather than the woman saying she knows someone who can fix it!

I will get quotes first as my insurance has gone up twice already through no fault of my own:mad:

bubbs

Ladyshopper wrote: »

Oh bubbs, sorry to hear about your car. How annoying.

Thanks, it is annoying, hope your ok?

Dormouse

From a womble

2x Asda Smartprice Golden Vegetable Savoury Rice (120G) £0.60 £0.50
2x ASDA Smartprice Tomato & Onion Pasta & Sauce (110G) £0.74 £0.40
1x ASDA Smartprice Spaghetti (500G) £0.35 £0.20
v T

Savvybuyer

Anon wrote: »

I read the article yesterday but I am not so sure that they wouild necessarily pull it as the 10% lower is a potential competitive advantage against the other big 3 - perhaps switching to instant vouchers at the till (same as T) but with the 10% off, or also including Adli or Ldle too (but a stage better than M who could not show the match results)? The announcement when they launched the 3agl3 3y3 deal was that the system had the facility to process (and issue) instant vouchers if I recall correctly.

If they did go instanst with the 10% off automatically, can you imagine the look on the SAs face if the glitches we sometimes enjoy now continued ...

Anon

Yes I got that as well - it doesn't necessarily mean it will be withdrawn, they could decide to extend it instead. The thing is, with them being perceived to be a lower price store, I suspect they are losing more to Adli and Ldle, as you so delicately put it, than the more upmarket stores. They could decide to extend to include the 'discounters' which, as we know, are often same price and don't have a lot of comparable branded items. There are however obvious extra costs in getting the data for them as well, which would have to be weighed against any benefit they thought they might get by attracting customers from those stores. The thing is that M have actually pulled back from that so maybe A would not be likely to do so or maybe it could steal an advantage by doing so?

They were trying for systems that were able to deliver vouchers to customers directly (incidentally allows them to keep data on their customers). However, I think the problem with the 10% (or potential problem) is that it relies on a lot of customers not actually taking it up by checking their receipts. Then again, it could be a competitive advantage - I don't know if A's advertising for the PG has gone a bit quiet of late - it's not like what it used to be - all over the store frontages etc. - so maybe that's why the drop in customers partly whereas if they were advertising more then more customers would visit. That said, I don't know about advertising at all as I tend to avoid watching any commercials and thus save money by avoiding by influenced by anything being advertised to me:rotfl:. So, I'm not aware of many advertising campaigns.

I did see - belatedly, over a month later - on the internet yesterday (when I was obsessing into the TBG) T's advertising with the cornflakes. The problem I think is that T's scheme is very easy to sell to people and people will go to T thinking they get the best deal on all the products in their shopping. It's a very good commercial. I noticed how the SA Donna could hardly get a word out and was being interrupted by the customer with the cornflakes. As such she was therefore unable to discuss the TBG in any detail. What it did, whether intended or not, was to distract attention away from the terms and conditions. The thing is that people generally aren't interested in the detail, they find it boring and just want to know they're getting the best deal. So the commercial reassures them of that and avoids mentioning any of the detail. However, the detail is absolutely vital - it means they are unlikely to get the difference in price on the cornflakes!

£1.28 difference for a packet of Kellogg's cornflakes seems quite a lot, and, based on standard £2 prices, would imply to me that T would have to be £3.28 for a packet of cornflakes for the product to "give" that amount! That is unlikely to happen: I've never see standard Kellogg's cornflakes £1.28 more expensive in T. All it gives is the same price as elsewhere and requires you to buy nine more items and, if you get the price match, stops you using cond.spends if your billl now falls below their amount. Clearly, if it were £1.28 off a shop, that must have resulted from some other branded items in the same shop. People generally will not realise however that, if they pick up a T special offer that also compares to the shop(s) with the Cornflakes on offer and the T special offer item is not also on offer there, then it's likely to be more expensive and detract from any "discount" given for the Cornflakes. So, if there is a special offer item at T that is £1 say, and it's £2 elsewhere, in effect this means that, although they get T's special offer item at its price, they then get 28p off the price of Cornflakes and not the full difference on that.

They would, in their shopping, therefore be likely not to get the Cornflakes at the same price as they are down the road. Even though their overall branded basket, if it compared correctly, would be the same as the other place. But that's because they would have paid £2 for T's special offer item instead of £1. (They would not have bought it at the other store but would have been likely to have bought a different special offer item, on special there, instead. Or just bought the Cornflakes at the offer price.)

For the sake of argument, say a basket at T consists of 8 different own label items, the special offer at £1 (that's £2 at the place with the cheaper cornflakes) and the cornflakes. If we assume the difference on the cornflakes is £1.28 (which it won't be - that must have been made up partly from some other branded item that was also cheaper at the same place), then if our basket now has that special offer item instead of what the people in the commercial must have bought, we get 28p off T's bill. In this situation, it would have been cheaper to buy T's special offer at T and to buy the cornflakes at the competitor. However, this is the boring detail that most people aren't interested in and the commercial therefore doesn't need to go into it!

Perhaps A would concentrate on reducing its prices as a whole and then say when we are more than 10% cheaper, we don't require you to buy ten items from us to get our prices. Which is what both of the stores now matching its prices do. The problem is that the APG message isn't as straightforward to sell. People might then counter "Yes but you require eight to take any benefit of that."

The problem is that T's message looks great and most people, who aren't interested in any detail, just want to be assured their shop will be the best value, will think that's what they'll get. We saw that woman whose article I linked to yesterday, how she appears to have thought she would get the cheapest price of every competitor and mixed the whole lot in one shop. People may think this means they'll automatically get the competitor's price on the cornflakes - however the advert does not state that they will and therefore isn't contrary to any regulations at all - when, instead, as we've seen, in my view, the TBG is now the worst of all schemes and at best merely gives you the same price as the competitor (but feels psychologically good to be getting a 'discount', when in fact all it is the same price as you could have got direct and wouldn't have had to buy ten items), only does that if every brand you buy in the shop is cheaper at the same place (or is not available there - hence non-comparable), does not include own brands which could be more expensive and stops cond.spends being usable.

It's the worst of all the various schemes - obviously DTD was fantastic (and had to be pulled!), the various caps each made that successively worse, then a minimum item requirement was introduced - presumably to stop people just buying one item that was cheaper and getting the difference - with two or more items there is at least the possibility that they will lose that (and T itself knows how people generally shop) - although the "cap" has now gone from £10 to £20, own brands have now been excluded so you won't get any cheaper prices of elsewhere on those and in effect are best, in my view, just buying the branded item at the cheaper place - as, at best, that's all you'll get on the vast vast majority of shops (i.e. not a staff discount or a T deal that is excluded under its own terms - and there it now would have to be branded items to get any benefit and it seems very unlikely).

However, people will as usual I feel go for something that is a worse and more inferior option:(, because it has a message that is easy to sell (and easy for people not to understand what it really means) rather than for something that does the job better. The old Videoplus vs Programme Delivery Control (PDC) thing. PDC was a technically superior system - however no-one (apart from tech geeks like me) knew or could understand what PDC meant - it's name itself was a problem - instead they went for Videoplus, that had an easy, selling, promotional name - "Video" and "plus" - suggested more and the inferior system got taken up by the public and won out.

LEJC

Dippydoo wrote: »

well thats what asda house told me

sometimes its not always cost effective for smaller maybe independent shops to accept vouchers even with the addition of the handling bonus they may receive...so they are quite entitled to stock the product,and equally entitled to display a clear sign to suggest that they do not accept vouchers....but they must display that sign in a prominent place not just say they dont accept the voucher as has been the case with the A's that some people have been reporting with the cidre

You also see this sometimes with smaller shop that are maybe attached to a petrol station for example.

savvy_sal

1x Carling Lager (20X440) £12.00 £11.00
1x Strongbow Original Cider (20X440) £12.00 £10.00

2 for £20 on receipt today 13.54

A v T

Chrisv

Fish 2 for £5, Pizza 2 for £5, Crackers 2 for £2

savvy_sal

1x Napolina Penne (1KG) £2.28 £0.99

A v T womble 18th

good comparison

Savvybuyer

http://www.stokesentinel.co.uk/Big-Issue-Tesco-s-Brand-Guarantee-promise-really/story-27976225-detail/story.html

I noticed this last night when looking for articles on TBG (most of which came out around the launch of the scheme).

"This new promotion is likely to reassure customers that they will get the best price at the till."

Says the senior lecturer in marketing.
Exactly what I've just said. People will think they'll get the best price - when in fact they are unlikely to do so as they are likely to put T's cheaper items into the same shop and thus lose some or all of the difference on the product that is cheaper elsewhere (which may be a different product in respect of different competitors). They will end up either paying T's full price or paying the overall basket cost of the cheapest overall competitor, rather than the best price on every branded item, in addition to paying the cost of the own brand items they've bought.

If they do get a few pence taken off, they may feel psychologically good at getting the "discount" and think that they are getting the cheaper prices of elsewhere, when in fact they're also getting the more expensive prices of the same place and have not got anywhere near getting a discount of the value of the difference on the item that was cheaper elsewhere. If you shop the way most people do, everything they do is geared at not getting a discount - as they pick up items whose prices on the shelf they see look good enough to buy. The only time they are getting any deduction therefore is when they make a "mistake" and pick up an item whose price is too expensive compared to what it is available for at elsewhere. They will also very likely buy items off the aisle ends or promotional items, placed in the store in locations likely to attract them to purchase, that are likely to be more expensive elsewhere and see them losing discount (and then not know about it - but still feel good if they get a few pence discount that they unknowingly don't realise has been slashed to from some pounds difference on some item they bought overpriced). Or if some of the items were same price as elsewhere - if that place was A, they could have had 10% cheaper price from there, rather than paying the same price at T, and should have bought only A's "more than 10% cheaper" items at T and bought at A all the items that reduced their "discount" at T and then claimed under its superior guarantee.

In the article, they put the TBG to the test and bought 10 branded items.

"We stocked up on branded products including Mcvities Digestive biscuits, Dolmio pasta sauce, Heinz tinned spaghetti and Robinson's blackcurrant cordial. The till was loaded up with the required 10 items – and £1.53 was deducted from the final total."

However, they don't reveal whether that was a full price match with every brand being cheapest at the same place - and thus the best price on them all. They don't tell us what the full actual result was and whether some of that deduction was lost through some of the items being cheaper at T than the competitor whose overall comparable bill worked out better. So, hurray, they got £1.53 taken off! But how much did they still pay for those items in total?