Supermarkets – The Modern Robber Barons

I was standing at the cashier in Sainsburys the other day trying to persuade the cashier to swipe my Sainsburys car park card so I could leave with my shopping.

 

She was refusing to do it because you have to spend a minimum of ten pounds on your shopping, otherwise Sainsburys charge you ten pounds for their car park instead. I had only spent about five pounds. Not enough for the greedy Sainsburys robber barons.

 

Actually, I hadn’t even wanted to spend even five pounds really as I had only been forced to return to the supermarket to exchange shorts I had bought for my nine year old son that had been incorrectly labelled by Sainsburys. They were the wrong size for him; therefore, utterly useless unless I went back and swopped them for the right size. That was the only reason I had had to go to Sainsburys in the first place.

 

So they were going to charge me ten pounds for the privilege of correcting their error of sloppily labelling their clothes, forcing me to return.

 

Anyway, I  was politely insistent about refusing to pay a ten pound car parking charge for less than a hour in the Sainsburys car park just in order to visit their supermarket. So the cashier gave my parking card to a passing supervisor and asked her to go to customer services, where they could swipe it as they had ‘the authority’ to do it and the cashier didn’t have ‘the authority’.

 

Isn’t bureaucracy a wonderful thing ?

 

As I heaved a sigh of relief at managing to  have the problem sorted out, there was a sudden shriek from a harridan dressing in the Sainsburys’ uniform. “You’re banned from the supermarket”, she shrieked at the top of her voice.

 

A hundred people around me at the busy tills froze as she slammed her hand on the panic button and shouted for security men to throw me out of the supermarket.

 

Can you believe it ?

 

I can’t !

Supermarkets Rip Us off

 

 

 

I noticed in the supermarket today that the only loose new potatoes were Jersey Royals at £1.99p a kilogram. There were no other loose new potatoes at all.

 

When I asked an employee at Sainsburys why they  were not still selling the Cyprus new potatoes they had been selling for weeks at less than one pound per kilo – that’s half the price of the Jersey Royals – he said that Sainsburys always stop selling the cheaper Mediterranean new potatoes in order to force customers to pay twice the amount of money for the much more expensive Jersey Royals when they come onto the market.

 

Is that a rip off or what ?

 

If you want to buy loose new potatoes at the price of less than one pound a kilo that you have been already paying for weeks, Sainsburys deliberately make sure you have to pay twice as much for the Jersey Royals, which are exactly the same type of potato. It is just that one lot is grown in the Mediterranean and are cheaper, and the other lot are grown in Jersey and are more than twice the price.

 

Paying two pounds in money for one kilo of potatoes is ridiculous. Many types of meat can cost only about two pounds per kilo weight. Ordinary chicken, for one.

 

We must be really stupid to let supermarkets get away with this kind of rip off manipulation. They are just plain nasty.

 

That reminds me. I was in Waitrose supermarket the other day and I saw their ‘Select Farm’ chickens at £1.93 per kilo. The size was described as 4-5 servings and the weight was 1.792 kilos. Then I saw a row of identical chickens at £2.90 odd per kilo. Except they weren’t exactly the same size; they were all one serving size smaller and described as 3-4 servings each.

 

When I asked a member of Waitrose staff why identical chickens (excepting one type being one serving larger) were two entirely different prices, one type being more than fifty per cent more expensive, they said they larger size chickens were ‘on offer’ and the smaller and more expensive chickens were not.

 

What do you make of that, then ?

 

Could it be even more manipulation. It’s a really good way of completely confusing customers and detaching any concept of prices for anything from reality.

 

Do you think this is why supermarket do it ?