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?

@VenusTiger 90p for a pint of milk is expensive - I thinks it's about £1.50 in the supermarkets for 4 pints.

Ethical milk that pays farmers a fair price (Co-op, Arla, Cravendale, Waitrose) is about £1.80 or a bit less. Other milk can be as low as £1 for 4 pints. Morrisons milk is £1.09

I got 6 pitta breads for 50p, and can get doughnuts for the same which I find pretty amazing.

@MrsJBaptiste oh good - glad to hear actually - I want to help our farmers out - the UK needs to start feeding itself a lot more.

I remember reading somewhere some time ago that one reason bananas are so cheap (as well as being loss-leaders in supermarkets, as they're the single most popular product) is because of the logistics of international transport. Countries in the Caribbean and Central America need to import loads of goods from elsewhere (probably mainly originating from China) and these come by sea on gigantic ships filled high with huge shipping containers.

These countries don't have a load of products for export trade that are of interest internationally. It would be just far too expensive to ship thousands of these containers back across the world empty and, if that were to happen, they would likely be charged double for the transport costs - From China (or wherever) to them and then back to China (via much bigger and richer countries).

However, owing to their climate, the one thing that they do have in abundant supply, that is eagerly wanted by the rest of the world, is bananas. Therefore, they often see the bananas not as something valuable to trade in their own right, but as a way of mitigating the transport costs of all of their imports.

European removals companies moving migrating Brits to France or Spain will give you a great deal if you happen to live in France or Spain, are moving to the UK and can be very flexible with your moving dates, as otherwise, they'd be spending a lot on diesel and wages just to drive empty lorries. The international banana trade follows the same basic principle but on a gargantuan scale.

@VenusTiger 4 pints is £1.10 in Aldi so 90p per pint is very expensive by comparrisson.

Cheap food usually means factory farming and animal suffering.
I don't understand why anyone wants to encourage animal suffering yet people are on here happy to buy cheap meat and other produce as if the fairies brought it to them.
Think about why it is cheap and the reason might be a bit sad......

Carrots
Milk

Ginger biscuits.

Chicken thigh fillets, massively cheaper than breast and much tastier IMO.

Ssshhhhh Squirrel!!

Don't let on about chicken thighs or there'll be none left for you and be!

We pay our milkwoman £2 for 2 litres of milk (free delivery), so twice the price of the shops, but the milk tastes much nicer and we know that the farmer is getting a very fair price for their milk.

I was disappointed to see that Aldi and Lidl offer eggs from caged hens, but I was really surprised to see Tesco doing the same recently. I thought it was now considered taboo - the big supermarkets trumpeted a few years ago that they only sold free-range - and that only some corner shops sold them; but it seems that, after the battle was won, people have grown complacent and they've made their way back through. Very sad - the price difference isn't even that big.

Pre-covid air travel is an obvious example. It should not be possible to fly to the other side of Europe for £/€ 39.

Andy Parsons made this point, when comparing the cost of cheap flights to rail fares. He commented that, if you live in London and have a friend in Glasgow, instead of either of you making the journey by train from one British city to the other, it was actually cheaper to buy a return plane ticket from London to Barcelona, buy your friend a return plane ticket from Glasgow to Barcelona and still have enough left for a meal for your both in the Spanish sun.

Chimney sweeping, one open fire and one stove, both swept fro £80, 90 minutes work for 2 people.

In all seriousness, they quite possibly earn more money (in the Summer, at least, COVID notwithstanding) from making brief appearances at weddings than they do actually sweeping chimneys. How many people are there wanting chimneys to be swept as opposed to couples getting married with at least one superstitious/'traditional' person somewhere in one of their close families?

www.flickr.com/photos/38301877@N05/albums/72157619206330728/

A "portable" tv in 1985 was more expensive (compared to income) than it is now. We wanted cheap, we got cheap. At the expense of British jobs and Aisan childhoods.......

House bricks and breeze blocks always surprise me for how very cheap they are. Yes, the actual intrinsic cost of making them is minuscule, but the costs of storing them between production and sale and, more to the point, buying, running and maintaining huge lorries for transporting them must be immense. Try picking up a bag with 20 house bricks in and most people would struggle to even lift it.

Now upscale that to 20,000, which you can buy at retail prices, based on the price for an individual brick (not with hefty bulk and/or trade discount) for about £3,000. Yes, £3K is a lot of money, but when you consider that £600 of it is VAT straightaway, then of the rest, it requires huge production facilities to be run and staffed, plus fleets of lorries that can bear immense weights costing hundreds of thousands to buy (as well as pallets and fork-lift trucks and qualified operators at each end), which then suffer from massive accelerated wear and tear and dreadful fuel economy as a direct result of that weight, not to mention wage costs for the drivers.

I just don't understand how they can do it and turn a profit - when you consider that sheets of stickers, hundreds of thousands of which would fit in a car-based van without breaching any maximum weight limits, often retail for £1 or more per single sheet.

We wanted cheap, we got cheap. At the expense of British jobs and Aisan childhoods.......

I think this every time I buy ridiculously cheap clothes from Asda or Tesco or wherever. A child's jumper takes a lot of skill and considerable time to make (especially because of the fiddly smaller sizes) and can often be bought for £2 or £3, from which, after costs, the woman or girl in Bangladesh who made it will see no more than 10p at the very most. If they added £1 (plus VAT) to the selling price, so that she could theoretically receive an 11-fold (or more) increase in her wages - still a low price for her time in making it, but that extra £1.20 on the price would make a phenomenal difference to her and her family's lifestyle; and I, like most Brits, wouldn't even give it a moment's thought if it were on the peg at £3.70 instead of the £2.50 it could have been.

Even boring clothing sundries such as pants and socks that are a couple of quid for a pack of 5, 7 or 10 for kids' ones necessarily take a significant amount of time, skill and human input to make, however much is invested in machinery and automation in the extended process.

Just as Black Lives Matter when it comes to not being murdered and abused by the police and society as a whole, so too do Asian Lives Matter when it comes to being able to live a basic family life rather than one of crushing poverty in return for many hours of hard, skilled labour each week.

Honestly, I like a bargain as much as the next person, but in cases like that, I just wish I could pay an extra pound or two and be certain that it would go to the person who did the most work, but will end up with by far the least money.

It would never happen, though. I have neither the money nor the desire to pay hundreds for a fancy name on designer clothes, but I understand that they're still mostly made by the same people in the same factories, taking the same time and using the same quality of material, and receiving the same pitiful rate per piece. If the big designers don't feel any moral justification to pay anything approaching a fair wage at the prices they charge, what chance the supermarkets and throwaway fashion stores selling main garments for a fiver?

Sorry, didn't mean to derail with my polemic there. If nobody (and nothing) is exploited and extreme mass-production alone can lower prices to ridiculously cheap levels, then bring on the bargains

Also, massively heavy things that are sold on eBay at already very low prices but which come with free postage for me, as an individual, ordering just one of them to be couriered direct to my door.

If I (as a non-business seller) were selling, say, a nearly-new home kitchen food processor at 50% of new shop price, I would still offer it as collection only; but I could order a brand new cast-iron anvil or 4-foot high concrete ornamental garden sculpture for the same price as I'd expect to pay at a garden centre - and delivery would be completely free.

I agree with onions I buy a bag of 12 or so for 50p. Lasts us a couple of months.

I like a bargain as much as the next person, but in cases like that, I just wish I could pay an extra pound or two and be certain that it would go to the person who did the most work, but will end up with by far the least money.

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Interestingly nobody knows how much bananas cost. There is no vague set price. Apparently supermarkets do this with certain products to keep us permanently confused...
Don't know how true that is.

As pp have said, milk, veg and meat, etc. are much cheaper than they need to be to provide producers with a decent return, and farmers have been saying so for years. If people are bothered about food standards, British agriculture, etc. they need to be aware of the failure to get baseline standards for food safety written into the recent agriculture bill, opening the door to cheap US imports. People don’t realise how strong our food standards legislation has been up to this point, and as various people have pointed out, it won’t be people who can afford to buy local, higher welfare meat who’ll be on the receiving end of rubbish imports, but people who rely on cheaper processed food. Sorry to get grumpy on a lighthearted thread, but I think it’s something we all need to be concerned about.

If I’m being honest GHDs, £99 when I brought mine and still going strong after 12 years of everyday use, compared to their products in that category I think they’re incredibly good value!!

@RoseMartha

I agree with onions I buy a bag of 12 or so for 50p. Lasts us a couple of months.

Good lord. A bag of onions lasts us a week...

I remember when Covid first hit and posters took a very "i'm alright jack" approach. If it had have been as deadly as they thought, the food and oil supply chain would have ended. We need lots of people living in poverty, so we get cheap goods. Which is why we've had the concern over Covid and not world hunger and we don't really want to help them with contraception. If their societies sort themselves out, we won't be able to afford the likes of coffee and chocolate, let alone bananas, or even clothes. Banana Union workers earn $10 a day, non union workers $3 a day.

Brexit and this mess are the perfect opportunity to give farming subs and all eat less meat, but higher welfare. Edinburgh University banned beef, but the beef supplied was grass fed and farmed locally. The production wasn't destroying the planet.

We need to start to be more aware.

£7 for window cleaning.

It’s a father/son and they take around 15minutes doing all of our windows plus travel time.

£7 for 30minutes work, they have to buy their own equipment, the have insurance, it’s dangerous , petrol etc etc

They run their own business and yet they’re probably on minimum wage with no holiday/sick pay.

@Nottherealslimshady

Meat. It's so sad that a life is worth so little. The cheaper it costs the less has been spent on it in life. I cant imagine raising a chicken for less than £4. Horrifying.

"Backs are cheap and wings are nearly free, nearly free." Suzanne Vega. Always found that so sad.

Food waste is tragic too, especially when it's a dead animal. It died so that someone could eat it but is just cast aside.

A packet of Tesco crumpets. 32p. I'm not a crumpet fan myself, but the kids enjoy them as a lockdown snack.