Elite 11+ shopping and chat thread part 2½

TrulyMadly wrote: »

Is there a reason I'm seeing unicorns everywhere?

Have I missed a Disney film?

There you are - I told you they existed:rotfl:. Even if they've been found in your imagination, perhaps along with the little green aliens and Bigfoot I mentioned the other day.

I can do a little quiz (not very interesting) tonight.

Garlic Doughballs - one store showing £1 offer price and five stores showing full price. And the real price is ...?

M Spotty Cupcake Cases - one store has £1 offer label, five stores have £1.10. Meaning that the real price is ...?

TrulyMadly wrote: »

Is there a reason I'm seeing unicorns everywhere?

Have I missed a Disney film?

It's national unicorn day (according to A's FB page at least)

Who makes this stuff up?

Time's up. I told you it wasn't interesting. The answers are Garlic Doughballs - one store £1 offer label, scans at £1. Spotty Cupcake Cakes - one store £1 offer label, obviously scans at £1.10:rotfl:.

I shouldn't be surprised if the APG gets some incorrect prices for M, both in our favour and against it. The SELs in my Ms are all over the place at the moment - I don't know if more than usual. I took two items to the till in one store and I've concluded that the item showing offer price is full price and the one showing full price is on offer price. As regards the situation on the Doughballs and Cupcake Cakes in just my stores, it seems to be that the Doughballs are showing full price in five because only one store has got round to putting the offer label up and the Spotty Cupcake Cakes are mostly showing £1.10 because one store hasn't yet got round to removing the offer label. It seems M HQ made too many price changes immediately after Easter for the store staff to cope. Whilst I have caught up with changes instore - I know, I think, what changes to prices there are, I know the items and have got the details with me - I am still well behind and not caught up with them on my list yet. I don't think the Doughballs went onto offer only now, I think they were already on offer at least last Thursday, when I also had one store that showed offer price, but I thought it might be a several-months-OOD SEL and had full price from all others so ended up wrongly thinking it was full price. I was in doubt though and had a vague thought it could be on offer but, because it was just one store, it wasn't strong enough to know. I might well have made a note to check this online and thus would have reached £1 for last Wednesday by going via online but hadn't reached the item yet. The further £1 SEL in another place yesterday (Monday) has now given more support to the one other store from last time and had me checking it and the product is £1 (at least in a place where I've got the £1 SEL).

However the list should be up-to-date. This is because I am being fairly quick at crossing out or removing items whose prices have expired in M - it's just that there are lots of new items to add. The key word is "should", because whilst I endeavour to cross out or remove the expired items I have seen, I could forgot or omit to deal with the odd one - or it may be an item that, quite rare, I can't remember whether it was on or off when I checked and I've therefore left it until I reach it within my masses of information which will take ages. I am trying to cross out/remove things but just use with caution and double-check against online in case it should not be there (then again, online may be completely different to instore). If an item has an expiry date that has already passed, many items have been crossed out under that date but this one item has been left on the list and not crossed out, that's normally deliberate - it usually means that the item appears still to be on offer and the offer has been extended in M - it's just waiting for me to find the new date, if there is one, and in any event to move the item to the appropriate place in the list. Again, given the number of items I am dealing with that are still outstanding, it could take me quite some time before I move them. Some I have replaced the expiry date with a question mark, awaiting me to find the new date later.

(As regards being up-to-date, I am not talking about changes that have happened on Monday just now but up-to-date with last Wednesday's expired items and hopefully will be up-to-date on Monday's expiries later today but obviously not immediately - probably start sometime this afternoon. Lots of new items from last Wednesday and everything from yesterday Monday is still yet to reach the list.)

Although the list should be up-to-date in the sense of keeping up with what's expired, it's possible that it could have an expired item if I have ended up with the offer price in error. Most unlikely indeed to be my error - as I have been diligently taking exactly what I see, but it could be I have unchanged offer SELs in every one of my stores, the item was not due to have expired or did not have an expiry date because it was/isn't online and therefore I don't know what the expiry date was, and there is nothing to alert me to the offer having ended in any of my stores. In addition, there's items on (or rather that were on) RTC that for me have been long-lost - some of these items, that I have not seen, could have ended their RTC and gone back to full price (if the items still exist in M) - however, we know what we mean by "the list is up-to-date" - it's means the regular items that are seen more recently and not the lost (for me) RTCs that are kept on with the assumption (that often turned out correct in the past) that they will be available in some M or another for months on end.

I have being considering whether to make the list more useful by indicating which items have gone and are unlikely to work. However, the problem is that, although an item might have long gone for me, it could be somewhere else and one of those places could be a collection store - in other words, it is not gone at all but is regularly there for months on end for the price collectors. I have a couple of items that might be long gone for nearly everyone and probably are not in collection stores as they are now in very few stores indeed - or it could even be just one. However, that one store is one of my stores, so I see these months-old RTC items very regularly and they are continuously in the one store for me. On that basis, I wouldn't necessarily know whether or not it had gone from a set of stores elsewhere. There are other items that have gone from being in all my stores to being in fewer and fewer each time, until left with them in just one place and, at the end of that, have just gone from there around about now. However, I wouldn't know whether they are items that stand no chance or whether the item is is regularly continuing to be available week after week in a collection store.

On the regular (non-RTC) items that are going from offer and back to offer, the APG has seemed to have what I believe to be full price crisps at offer price for the past half week and what I believe to be crisps on offer in M last Wednesday at full price. In my stores, there are many items that could go either way, based solely on the SELs and it seems each store has got round to a proportion of changes and got round to different ones so many places, on quite a few items, are showing old prices and the general trend at the moment therefore may be for items to have to wait for more stores, eventually, to get to them - the SELs and therefore the prices the APG has for M may be lagging behind. In a way, it may therefore be a better thing that it is taking me time to get to putting new items on, as perhaps many of them might not work yet. I think I may leave last Wednesday's new items in bold when I add further items, that are not known to have expired since, onto the list from that day - that should already work but might not so do if the SELs in most APG stores hadn't been changed by last Wednesday. The problem also is that we are doing collections on days when prices have just changed and sometimes seeing the SELs before the staff have changed them - particularly my first store of the day, I am seeing unchanged SELs because it is earlier in the day - hopefully I do pick these up in other stores as I am going throughout the day and seeing others later - however the APG might be fairly early in the day at all their stores and therefore slower to change.

However, on the regular items the list should be keeping largely up-to-date as the expired items are being dealt with fairly soon. It's just lots of the new items are yet to reach the list. When I put them there, I think I will leave the Wednesday ones (from last week) in bold - they should already be working but the system might be lagging behind as stated and could only work from the next update, or even that might be too soon - and I will put the Monday items (from yesterday now) in italicised bold so you can tell what's not going to stand any chance of working until the next update (unless the APG stores changed their SELs before mine or changed them prematurely and/or if the items have been on offer for several weeks already in M but I think they have only just gone on offer because it's taken every one of my stores weeks until only now putting the offer label on display and I haven't picked the item up previously from online despite not having the offer showing in my stores).

It's all very complicated:rotfl:.

I have devised a system where, for now, I can do price collections, of sorts, even though I have not got the new items fully onto my list. So I'm trying to keep up-to-date. I probably am up-to-date again, but it's getting details onto here, which takes longer than collecting the information in the first place - because I have to look at competitors' prices to see if they are better than M, wait for go-slow websites online - told you it's much easier visiting a store to see what seems to be on offer than trying to find it from online. If I was doing my list solely from using online, tbh I would not know where to start to find new offers on the supermarket's own website - even Savvy buys on msm misses items that have gone onto offer - I find it a lot easier finding the information by visiting a store, because looking through all the shelves online would, for me, take ages and opposed to just walking round a store and seeing everything they have straight in front of me (rather than trying to trawl through shelves online).

Meanwhile, another one - Pledge polish, £1 offer showing in one store, full price showing in five. Obviously I think that one will be full price:rotfl:. That one is because, I think, one store has not got round to removing its offer SELs.

However, it could go the other way - I have now looked online for other items, having ended up with offer price on them from instore, and noticed that they have gone to full price. So, I have ended up with what I now think is the wrong price and the APG could get expired M offer price on some things in error.

Before I end, on separate things, just an example of how I end up with my prices. The larger Flash liquids last week were one. I started off with full price in my earlier stores. Then I had one store showing offer prices on them both, but thought it may be OOD offer as the items had seemed to end on that offer not long ago and could be expired offer SELs in that store and therefore really full price as both my earlier stores said. However, now I have one with offer prices, the items that seemed previously resolved are now unresolved:mad:(:rotfl:). So my third store gives me more outstanding items than I had before I went there! I take Flash liquids to the next store and... offer price on one but full price on the other:(:mad::mad::rotfl::rotfl:. Now, I don't know whether they are on offer or full price. However, I go to the next store and see both of them out at the front with large offer SELs. So that settles them for me - both of them with offer price:cool:. However, I've had things out at the front with large SELs before and they have turned out to be incorrect when the product was then scanned at the SS. Even if a store has large hoardings up and seem to be promoting an offer, it could still be that the item has gone to full price and is no longer on offer and that they haven't got round to removing or moving their large hoardings yet. I think it's just a lesson to check your receipts every time as, even if something was out at the front and with a large offer label, it still might not be. However, on this occasion, I am hoping the offer labels are correct (having had another store also showing them and one sort of half and half maybe they are, maybe they are not).

It's like this on perhaps a greater number than usual items at the moment - and it is both ways: full price when on offer and offer price showing when it is now full price. The staff are doing their best in every store, seemingly struggling to keep up.

I am also finding items in stores where I have never had them before. On my Vimto 2L remix, you may remember this has been very difficult for me to see instore at times, with me being no trace for weeks at the start and having to rely on online. Eventually, it appeared for a 10 second glimpse for me in one of my stores on a Monday, before being totally absent two days later. I recently caught up with it, not at that store, but at another one - where I was so surprised I stared at it for longer and thus had more than a 10 second glimpse; however, sure enough, it had vanished from there and all of my other stores the next time:mad:. On Wednesday/Thursday last week - I knew my Wednesday stores were not ones that would get me everything I needed to see and therefore visited others on Thursday - they gave me a TBG items and I believe TBG collects on Thursdays as one of its days - I was absent on Vimto Remix 2L again... until my final store. A place where I haven't had it before. By that time, I was almost thirsty from the effort of looking for it through nine previous stores and, when I finally found it in my tenth store of the two days, I nearly bought it:rotfl:.

This time, I have been unable to visit the place where I found it last time. Instead, I have revisited other places that were absent from it on the last round trip of those stores - and found it in one of them, not the one where I lost it from after the 10 seconds, not the other one that had it and was no total trace the following time, but instead one that hasn't had it before for me. I wonder if I shall have it there on Wednesday or whether I will be no trace again:rotfl:.

I shall work through my information as soon as I can - and then take a break from updating on much of Wednesday when I will be just be adding further to it for me then to have to catch up with later:doh:. Anyway, I might not post very often - just to let you know - I am instead saying everything in the one post, such as now - and will be updating the list. See you later:D:wave:.

EDIT: Can't believe you'll read all this:rotfl::rotfl:, and well done if you have!