Who is doing the maths at Asda?

[Blondiebeachbabe]

In this day and age, when people have been subjected to the COL crisis, you might think that most people would look at the cost of products by gram, and choose accordingly. How then, can Asda get this SO wrong? 3 different kinds of tuna, but all weigh the same, and yet some genius has them all marked up at different prices per gram. Does no one check this stuff? This is not the first time I've noticed the maths is a load of rubbish. It's not a one off!

It says the weight is ‘net contents.’ Presumably all the cans have a standard weight to work out transportation/carbon footprint etc. The price per gram is presumably the weight of the tuna only minus the water/oil/brine. Worth checking with them though.

It is quite interesting (can’t be bothered to search all the listings though) because presumably you are getting more tuna for your money depending on what preservative you want it stored in.

It's not the drained weight thing.

If you look at the tuna in springwater, they have it labelled up as £3.49 per 100g.

132g x 4 tins = 528g of tuna for £3.25

£3.49 for 100g would make the 4 tins £18.42

It's totally off. And it's on loads of products, this is just one example.

It's not acceptable. There are plenty of people on a budget, who would pick a product based on the £ per 100g, but they could actually be picking the more expensive option without realising. How on earth is that ok?

Cool. I'd love to have enough disposable income that I didn't have to choose each item in my grocery shop based on which variety is the best value, so... 🤷🏼‍♀️
OP, Asda is the worst supermarket for this IME. A one-off I would chalk up as an accident but it's so prevalent there that I can only assume it's deliberate.

It should be correct yes, but the vast majority of people on a budget don't check them. It doesn't matter if the price per 100g is cheaper on the larger product if you only have enough to pay for the smaller one. Commander Vimes boots.

You can be on a budget but have some slack in it and your money can go significantly further if you do check prices and buy multipacks, we're not talking about the minority who have no spare money whatsoever.

Plus when you get into the swing of it, you buy different things each week. It's just a matter of buying the tuna one week, soup the next, then the beans etc and buying a rotating stock of multipacks that work out significantly cheaper per item than buying one each of tuna, beans and soup each week.

But actually, you probably wouldn't be looking at those three tins side by side, its more likely you'd be comparing the branded tins of tuna in brine with the own brand in brine or whatever. So it might cause you to think these were cheaper overall than Asda own brand tins even if the overall cost was more (I always look at the price per 100g to figure out which is the better value).

Someone posted a picture on our local FB page of some multi-pack cans of coke on 'offer' in Asda reduced from £8 to the new cheaper price of £8.80......

Wtf? You have so little going on your life that you are applying to a thread that you don't give a shit about. We all know who is a loser here!

My local supermarket (not uk) is terrible for this. I always look at price per 100g or kg or litre etc. But now I have to work it out with the calculator and its really annoying.

Although it was funny once when shopping with my DS and explaining prices to him. I showed him that we wanted 2l of orange juice but it was cheaper per litre to buy 2x1l (same brand). The shopper next to me paused, checked the labels, then copied us 😁 Thing is, the OJ changes prices literally every couple of weeks where we live so I have to check it every single time 😔

Don't eat tuna. It's full of mercury.

You don't quite understand how a forum works, do you?

There are accounts on social media that point out anomalies like this- 1 for £2, 2 for £5 is a popular one 🤔 Or things like usual price £8, sale price £7.99

My understanding is that its done on purpose to make comparison more difficult and to influence the shoppers choice of item. Comparable products often have one listed as "price per 100g", one "per item" and another "per pack". No accident.

Or she could post about it on here as well, because people are told to read the price per weight. So it's good to tell people that the supermarkets can't be trusted on that.
It looks like they are pushing to sell the brine product, is it a coincidence that in all the health articles we are told to avoid that one?
@User457788 you might not, but disabled etc people often have no choice but to shop online and many have to resort to putting shopping on a credit card. People choose branded thinking higher welfare/less additives etc.
The whole point about our food/trading standards is to make billion pound companies transparent, why posters don't get that is a bit of a mystery.

It isn't. You just could do with possibly limiting it. It's a good source of cheaper/easy to use, protein etc for many.

I think a supermarket getting basic stuff wrong like this is important. I buy 80+ items when I do an online shop and am unlikely to be checking whether I've been stiffed on the price with each one. We have to be able to trust major retailers to get this stuff right, they make so much money out of us all every year.

The price of these products is the same. Personally I'd only check the price per weight of the overall price was different.

I went through a diet phase a few years back and bought the share size monster munch because the calories were so low. It said "98 cal per pack" so I was loving life only to see the same cal per pack on the tiny packs you get in multipacks. Turned out they were labelled wrong and inadvertently been shovelling loads of extra calories in my gob 🙈😂 i emailed them and they apologised and corrected it. Hopefully I have saved future dieters from the same error...

youre unreasonable for shopping at asda

On a similar theme, I once complained to Sainsburys about the shelf comparison prices for laundry tabs. There were at least three different sizes of bag. They all told you how many tabs per bag but then some had the comparison price per 100g and some per wash.

OK so I am fairly numerate so I could work the comparison price out for myself with the information provided, but that's beside the point. If they are providing a comparison price it should help you do just that so should obviously be in the same units.

Anyway, giving a price per 100g for something sold in number of units is not helpful.

Fwiw, Asda are quite good when you contact them if you've overpaid because of things like this. There was an incorrect shelf label and I got a £3 voucher (price difference £1.50).

There have obviously been some data entry errors as most of the tuna shelf is wrong. Also the 125g tins are more expensive than the 132g (in a different tin).

It is advised limited because of the mercury. Why would you eat heavy metal unless you actually want a brain injury.

You would think that this would be some kind of automatic calculation by whatever system manages their website.
An excel spreadsheet with formulas at least!

Im no web site manager (or whatever you call it) but I’d be surprised if this was a human manually inputting these values???

On a related note, I was looking at I think teabags recently and the price per unit was a different unit.
So pp teabag
Pp 100gm
Pp kilo sort of thing, I forget the units used, but they weren't overly helpful in deciding which was cheapest. I've seen that on lots of foodstuffs. Randomly vary the unit used to make it next to impossible to find which was cheapest overall unless you had a calculator or knew how much each teabag weighed.

I once got a bottle of wine from morrisons with a yellow sale sticker on it for £7.99, the label was peeling off and underneath was the original price of.... you guessed it, £7.99.

Was very pissed off.

That’s different, though - it’s not bad maths, it’s active deception on the part of the store and I’ve seen it a lot in different supermarkets. They make something look like a bargain (XXL, ‘value pack’, ‘limited time offer’, etc.), and when you check the price per 100g, it works out cheaper to just buy the regular size. They often do it with higher priced stuff like washing powder & it’s completely fucking iniquitous.