to wish supermarkets were more transparent in their pricing?

[ethelb]

I am lucky enough to have a really good grocer/market stall that sells excellent fruit and veg near me, and the time to go to the butchers (which is good and near to me) but it has really thrown the wierdness of supermarket pricing into the light for me.

For example, tenderstem brocolli has just come into season and is £3/kg at the market stall. It is v fresh. Sainsburys is selling it for £7.50/kg at the moment.
However, market stall has out of season stuff, eg pepers £1 each (1) but Sainsburys is selling them for approx 40p each (basics bag).

There are many other examples.

WE got 1kg of sausages (local pigs!) from the butcher for £5. Sainsburys equivalent is £6.98/kg. They sell things like chuck mince cheaply too. This is not available in supermarkets by that name but cheap mince of indeterminate contents is. I would pay for chuck mince in a supermarket, nothing wrong with that, but it isn't labelled as such!

Butcher sells some things for far more, eg beef goes up to £41/kg but the highest Sainsburys goes is about £14/kg. WE got two lamb chops for £5 but Sainsburys would be selling them for about £2.50 for two.

I like to eat seasonally and I am happy to spend a bit more for out of season stuff if I have to (ie crucial ingredient for dinner party ect), but feel this is hard to do cheaply at supermarkets. They sell out of season stuff cheap but they make up the prices by not dropping the prices sufficiently when it is in season.

AIBU?

YANBU

I'm fed up with ridiculous supermarket pricing. What seemed to start originally as some good offers means that nowadays you have no idea what anything should cost as prices constantly go up and down. One week it's this price, then it's on offer, but sometimes the offer price is no better than the original price - or even worse. Tesco are the worst offenders but other supermarkets do it too.

I would trust a local grocer or butcher far more in terms of pricing. I recently stayed in a town where there was a local greengrocer (we don't have one, sadly) and I was stunned at both how cheap the fruit was, and how lovely and tasty it was compared to the rotting mush that Tescos turn out.

@musicposy that's the thing. The butcher and greengrocer could adjust their prices in the same way but don't. TBH the amount spent is similar and i go to the supermarket for all other things, so why can't supermarket just be more honest.

Lots of frugal threads say shop seasonally, but it's just not the case at supermarkets. Over the year you might spend the same amount, but have a tight week and they don't help you out. Plus the environmental cost of course. We had our first tomatoes in 6 months this week and I don't think we have missed out.

we can all see what they are doing!

I increasingly feel like I need to take a calculator shopping with me to the supermarket, and I have to study price labels very carefully to compare price per unit.

I ask myself if I think the item is worth the price it is being sold at. But I feel like I've lost touch of the actual price of things these days.

I wish we had a local greengrocer, I'd definitely use it.

YANBU - plus the air miles in shipping all the out of season stuff to us.

Supermarket pricing is getting more and more difficult to decipher. What I'm currently finding really annoying is all the yellow labels in Tesco that look like something is on special offer when in fact it is usually multi-buy deals.

It takes me so much longer to get around the supermarket these days trying to work out what is a good deal or not!!

If we only had a fruit and veg shop locally - but supermarkets have successfully put them all out of business around here...

does anyone know the economic reason behaind this? wouldn't they make the same amout of money if they made prices rise and fall with availability?