Why are supermarkets allowed to charge 2.5 times as much when you buy 1 pint of milk as opposed to 4 pints of milk?

[DogDayze]

In sainsburys,
4 pints of semi-skimmed = £1.45 which is £0.64 per litre
2 pints of semi-skimmed = £1.15 which is £1.01 per litre = an increase of 37%
1 pint of semi-skimmed = 85p which is £1.50 per litre = an increase of 136%

This seems designed to screw the single person who doesn't use much milk (or those people who don't understand the price differential).

ok, there's slightly more packaging and it takes up fractionally more space but nothing like enough to justify those increases.

exactly profiteering; some mark up would be Ok as they both use a single container and obviously it costs more to make 4 x 1pint than 1 x4 pint but not 137% more but the raw ingredients don't cost more transportation would be a tiny tiny increase as 4 pints fits into a space only very marginally smaller than a 4 x 1pt

I suspect that the actual milk sadly only makes up a very small proportion of the price. Farmers get paid so little for it!

I assume they sell more of the 4 pints tbh Iots of things cheaper when you buy in bulk. Crisps and chocolate spring to mind. A 4 pack of boost bars is £1 a single bar is 85p. A multipack of walkers is £1.50 a single pack £1. Single ice creams often cost as much as a pack of four.

I just buy a bigger carton and decant milk into a thermos for work. Milk freezes well if near use by date. Uht milk is 75p a litre and lasts longer than fresh milk once opened might be a better option for people who don’t use a lot.

I think that's a separate discussion about how much farmers get.

Economies of scale

This is pretty much the case across the board, it's usually cheaper to buy a bigger pack of something- of course not helpful if it's something that goes off quickly. If you move to plant based milk a carton stays fresh for longer albeit it's more expensive in the first place.

No, it costs very little more to put in 1 or 2 pint bottles. It's all done in the same processing plant.

Why are they "allowed"? Because it's a free market economy and the purpose for their existence is to make money.

The packaging costs more than the milk so it is bound to cost a lot more for a smaller amount.

The milk isn’t the bulk of the cost, it’s the packaging, handling and transport etc… It’s maybe 40p a litre at the moment at the farm gate.

Milk is generally a loss leader for supermarkets so they aren’t making any money on it in most cases.

Buy a couple of pints. Wash out the pint containers. Put the milk into those and freeze it. That's what I do.

Judging from the comments on here about energy prices people don't really want free markets any more.

I thought that often the point was by selling larger sizes for not much more, you are encouraged to buy the bigger one and so spend more money.

As an aside, you can freeze milk. So buy a big container and decant into several smaller ones and freeze them. Of course this does require a decent size freezer.

It's nothing to do with packaging or shelf space or the labour involved in handling multiple small containers instead of one big one or trying to screw individual shoppers or penalize people who don't drink a lot of milk but still need some.

Don't take it personally, and if you want a command economy where the governemt sets prices then maybe North Korea is the place for you.

because whether its a 1 or a 4 pint bottle - it needs to be filled, packed, handled, transported, checked, labelled, stacked on a shelf, handled by a cashier etc all of those things dont change - they are all costs and processes that will apply per item

So it is better to look at it that all of the the above costs eg 80p then the actual cost of the milk is 5p for a pint, 35p for 2 pints and 96p for 4 pints.

It really does!

100 pints of milk in volume in 100 x 1 pint bottles costs more to produce than 50 x 2 pints or 24 x 4 pints.

It’s more items through the belts, more bottles, more tops, more labels, more packing. Likely more deliveries, more QA sampling, more overheads for the retailer (shelf space, storage, stock rotation)….

Have you any concept of manufacturing and retail costings? It is almost always cheaper to produce larger quantities of the same product. That’s why buying in bulk is often considerably cheaper.

Milk is a loss leader and the 4 pint bottles particularly so- they are one of the things that customers tend to know the price of and compare across supermarkets. It always used to be the case that supermarkets wanted to keep 4 pints under a pound but that's obviously gone out of the window.

Nothing to stop you buying 4 pints & freezing it in smaller portions.

fyi - the price for 6 pints per litre is 63p which is almost identical to the price for 4 pints, ie 64p per litre which kind of negates the economies of scale argument

This.

@DogDayze I don’t think you understand, supermarkets make a loss on all of the milk they sell, the prices aren’t reflective of the actual costs of production. Of course it costs more to package 6 pints into individual bottles than it does 6 pints into one big bottle.

So once you get over a certain amount of milk, the cost of the product takes over as the main pricing factor?

It's annoying, but it's also easy to find workarounds, so it's really not worth getting annoyed about.

Just buy a 4 pint and freeze what you don't use. It will last a good few days past the use by date anyway, so there's usually loads of time to use the milk.

Most people will probably buy the 4 pint bottles due to cost and it being a convenient amount of milk, so maybe they don't want people buying smaller bottles of milk?

it doesn't normally affect me, I usually buy the 4/6 pint bottle but sometimes they don't have these and I've been a bit shocked at how much the smaller bottles cost.
I suspect there are people buying the smaller bottles for convenience who don't realise they are paying a lot more for it.

It is also the work of filling the bottle, transporting the bottle, putting the bottle on the shelf, etc. Those cost as much whether it is one pint or four.

It's the same reason 500ml bottles of juice cost similar if not more than 2L bottles. People buy smaller bottles on the go so are willing to pay more for the convenience.