Supermarket reduced to clear

obeywan_kenobe

I am disappointed with the pathetic reduction supermarkets give for there reduced to clear items. It usually is about 15% which if you consider that the goods are about to be thrown away is a bit silly.
Maybe the staff get to keep the good if it doesnt sell?

An example is Crispy duck original value £6.99 reduced to clear value £5.99
and the expiry date was today. Needless to say I declined the offer.
I would be tempted more if it was £4.99. The reduced to clear section was chock a block with shoppers just looking and leaving.

Bossyboots

With our local Tesco, the price goes down during the day.

However I always check carefully how the offer works out as BOGOF and other offers do not apply on reduced items.

Several times, today included, I have worked out that buying two items from the fresh shelf with the multi buy offer is cheaper than buying two reduced items.

Cerbera_2

I used to be a manager on the fresh departments of two supermarkets.
My theory was exactly what it was Reduce To Clear!
I would rather lose the money and shift it early in the day than spend the whole day reducing it further and be left with the product anyway.

lush_walrus

Marks & Spencers do not reduce food, as the food is offered to the staff at a discount price 2 times a week, then if it doesnt sell there it is given to charity. Quite a nice way to do it really.

stressedoutmum

Our local sainsburys used to have really good deals about 6pm-ish but not anymore. They probably realised people hold off until then to shop but dont know if they mark it really low before they close as cant be bothered to go that late.

elona

I used to get really good stuff at our Sainsbury as well at 6p.m. and the same thing has happened here - shelf empty by 6p.m.!

Mr_Proctalgia

Morrisons Tills cannot cope with the complexities of reduced and bogof's - Last week they had a mountain of chicken goujons (which were on BOGOF) reduced from £2.99 to £0.99 so we got two of them, went through the till and we still got the BOGOF. So I went back and cleared them out got them all for 50p - Happy happy bunny now.

zodiac

When the strawberrys are on special or BOGOF at my local sainburys and they get reduced I get them on the reduced price and the money off the 'normal' price, its been like that since I worked there 2 years ago :rotfl:

I like M and S's way of doing it, one branch in london give their 'old' food to the sally army. My local morrsons wait till the end of the day to reduce as well, which means there are many people in the shop at 6 on saturday and 3ish on a sunday.
It really anoys me when some managers dont know what 'Reduce To Clear' really means. (unlike cerbera up there at post 3)

IvanOpinion

I remember when I worked for a supermarket ... on a Saturday evening various lines would be reduced before closing time. Some people got wise to this and would stand about for hours waiting for the call saying that the stuff was reduced ... then these people turned into a pack of wild animals .. it was like feeding time at the zoo .. no manners .. ripping it from each others hands etc.

I used to laugh at them because one of our assistant managers used to basically play jokes on them. He always changed the point in time when he reduced them so the real bargain hunters could be standing about for anything up to 3 hours waiting for the call. Sometimes he left it until about half-an-hour before closing .. usually the bargain hunters had been up to the information desk making loads of complaints about the shop wasting their time ... the more they complained the longer the assistant manager waited.

Some days he even managed to maximise profits by making the usual announcement to start the scrum of people and while they were busy fighting each other it was made clear he was only reducing the stuff by 1p - it was amazing how many people did not notice until after they left the shop or were too embarassed to say anything at the checkouts. As soon as they got the animals out of the way he would reduce the stuff by about 50%.

What amazed me though was that people would stand about for an hour or more waiting for something to be reduced by 10-20p .. they must have had very sad lives with nothing better to do. Even as a shelf packer/fork-lift driver I earned £4 an hour and I would not wait about for an hour to save 10p

Ivan

mah_jong

obeywan_kenobe wrote:

I am disappointed with the pathetic reduction supermarkets give for there reduced to clear items. It usually is about 15% which if you consider that the goods are about to be thrown away is a bit silly.
Maybe the staff get to keep the good if it doesnt sell?

An example is Crispy duck original value £6.99 reduced to clear value £5.99
and the expiry date was today. Needless to say I declined the offer.
I would be tempted more if it was £4.99. The reduced to clear section was chock a block with shoppers just looking and leaving.

Sounds like the supermarkets near me (neither are Tesco!!) BUT you hardly ever get a true bargain. The sections have RFQS..but as you have found very little has come off price.

philldutton

I used to work in a supermarket (doing reductions) whilst at Uni, our manager was quite strict about reductions and wouldn't let us knock more than 33% off.

He used to say it was pointless to reduce stuff down to silly prices as you end up getting less for the products than it costs in wages to pay the person reducing it.