Things that are inexplicably cheap

[ChewChewIsMySpiritAnimal]

Inspired by the thread about things that are inexplicably expensive!

My pick is bananas. You can buy a huge bunch of bananas for a few pence - I'm always shocked when i get to the till and find I've got about 22 bananas for less than a quid exaggerating but they've been imported from halfway round the world - yet the British apples next to them are twice as much.

What do you find inexplicably cheap?

How rude are you @Flyinggeese I was only commenting to answer the question how did people afford them. A lot of people rented them. I remember we even rented our BT telephone.
Of course the £150 price is true. My mum’s first microwave in the 80s was £100

Let's not fall out and spoil a very interesting thread over what seems to me to be a clear misunderstanding.

Yes, TVs were very expensive, meaning that many/most people rented them - and probably couldn't have fathomed ordinary people being able to afford to buy them outright; but they were indeed available to buy if people were able to come up with the considerable amount of money that they cost.

Apologies @SiliconHeaven.

I remember we even rented our BT telephone.

That was one of those strange anomalies that lasted (and filled BT's pockets) for decades. When home phones first came on the scene, I believe everybody did rent them - I don't know if it was possible to buy them outright, even if you had the money (maybe it was).

Because everybody was used to doing it, people didn't question the status quo, but there were still a great many households paying to rent them from BT even once push-button phones started to come out from other manufacturers to replace the ones with a dial and were freely available to buy outright for the same cost as one or two quarters' rental cost.

You could buy them for £10, which by then was not really very much money, but it still took many households (including ours) a long time to cotton on. Maybe a few people do still rent their handsets from BT even now?!

Perhaps people doubted the quality or compatibility of the new-fangled ones over the 'proper' BT ones - in the same way as some folk still believe that British Gas somehow provides the 'best' gas?!

I think the term ‘loss leader’ is so misleading. It implies that the supermarkets are losing money on some things and making it up on others - but they pass the cost to the farmers and refuse to pay anything like a reasonable price for milk/meat/bananas, so they cover themselves both ways - they don’t take the hit and they have their profits on other items too. Many farmers go out of business despite producing a commodity people really want and buy regularly because they’re caught between the supermarkets and British welfare standards. And I don’t think welfare standards should drop. Supermarkets claim customers won’t pay more, but I’d like to see Britons giving up milk entirely because it cost an extra 50p or so!

Sausages! Middle range Sainsburys about £1.50!

own brands basics like baked beans 22p bargain

Hohofortherobbers.Our Sainsburys have 5 for 80p! One day we got a bag and there were 6 of the beasts in there!

Milk, its probably a pretty disgusting amount, that the farmer receives compared to what the supermarkets get?

My guess is, if we pay £1.10 for 4 pints, the farmer gets 40p?

Sausages! Middle range Sainsburys about £1.50

Yes, this is why i always dispute with people who say vegetarian food is cheaper.

Two leeks cost more than a packet of sausages.

A whole chicken costs less than an aubergine and a few courgettes.

I know which goes furthest in feeding a family.

Vegetarian food may be cheaper than free range organic meat, but not cheaper than bog standard ordinary supermarket meat, which despite what people say on here, the vast majority of people eat.

Food is cheap in the UK due to supermarket competition. Food is much dearer in Ireland. There are fewer supermarkets and more produce is sourced locally. I shop in aldi & lidl in Ireland and they are significantly more expensive than aldi & lidl in the UK. E.g. The Lidl bakery stuff is 29p in UK but 79c in Ireland.
When I lived in Spain there was a huge difference in the produce sourced locally E.g you could get a 3kg box of strawberries for €3 but 4 apples were the same price.
Conversely, avocados from the farm down the road were double the price of avocados from Peru.
Labour is the biggest cost of any product/service. Hence why clothes have stayed the same price over the last 30 years. In 1990 they were made in the UK so UK wages were paid to manufacturers. In the late 90s/early 00s manufacturing was moved to Turkey and Asia. Labour costs decreased so the end price of the product didn't need to increase.

own brands basics like baked beans 22p bargain

Absolutely extortionate compared to the Great Supermarket Baked Bean Wars of the late 90s, when you could get them for 3p a tin in Kwik Save

Kwik Save were so cheap and ahead of their time I remember buying cereal, pasta, rice and biscuits (loved the broken biscuits), cat biscuits and I think flour that were weighed out (by yourself) from big storage bins 😁

Now a few shops are doing this to save the environment from more package wage charging extortion amounts of money

Waste not wage ...

@helpfulperson petrol?! Are you joking?! Petrol is not cheap.

I can remember when petrol was 75p. Per gallon!

Circa 1975-ish (I think).

Oh and wine. An Aussie friend couldn't believe how cheap the Aussie brands are over here (UK) - they're much more expensive in Australia without having been exported.

Wine is much cheaper on the continent. I don't find it very cheap here.

"i know families who earn way more than we do but still insist on shopping in the cheapest places for food"

Yes i think we are - but thats also to do with us being better cooks - a lot of people that dont cook dont understand or appreciate where or how they get their food from and will also eat more ready meals and junk 8n general.

I think we are healthier i should have said above......

Over the last 40 years the percentage of disposable income spent on clothes and food against housing had flipped flopped, with housing now our main expense not feeding and clothing our families. The amount we spend on food is shockingly low to sustain food producers and quality and welfare just have to be compromised in the production to meet our demands of low cost food. We use all our disposable income (and some) to ensure we have basic shelter. It's mad really.

I can't eat a whole big one anyway.

You can't eat a whole banana?!

Eggs
My son has chickens, and it costs about 19p per egg in feed to keep them. That doesn't take into account the time he spends cleaning them out, scrubbing, filling and carrying water drinkers, maintaining fences, making nest boxes etc. Added to that, if he buys egg boxes (just the boxes, mind you, not the eggs) they are 30p each. So how can you buy 30 eggs for £3 in the supermarkets, as a couple of his customers remind him? Makes no sense.
Fortunately most people reuse the boxes until they fall apart.

So how can you buy 30 eggs for £3 in the supermarkets, as a couple of his customers remind him? Makes no sense

It makes plenty of sense. Mass production and economics of scale will explain it.

Which supermarket is selling 30 eggs for £3? They're normally more like £2-£2.50 for a dozen. Eggs are one of those things that are never particularly cheap or on (significant) offer, like butter and cheese, as has already been said.

If somewhere is selling them at 30 for £3, their poor hens must have the most rotten lives; however, I wonder if they're exaggerating and just plucking figures out of the air in the hope of getting them for next to nothing.

They probably think that, because he isn't a big producer, he's doing it as a hobby - so he should expect to pay for his 'hobby' from his own money - and thus should be grateful to them for taking the eggs off his hands. They sound like CF chancers to me.