The price of gas is sitting at 68.5 cents a litre here today.
And you'd think it was free, the way people are lining up to get it.
Now, granted, I haven't seen gas at this price for a couple of years at least. And I also know--as does everyone else, apparently--that tomorrow's price is very likely to be ten cents a litre higher. It always goes up Monday night here; it's axiomatic.
But as usual, I don't get it.
Okay, let's do the math together. The average fill-up (I know this from my days working at a gas station) is about 30 liters. That means a $3.00 saving if you fill up tonight versus tomorrow. But you've got to wait fifteen minutes to fill up if you do it tonight.
How much is your time worth? Mine's worth a lot more that $12.00 an hour.
(Caveat: if you have an SUV sitting on dead-nuts empty, you can put in 120 liters and save yourself $12.00. Then again, if you're driving an SUV around the Greater Toronto Area, and you bought it, and it's yours, then buddy, you should be paying twice as much to fill it up. Call it an ozone tax, or something.)
I see this kind of thing play out over and over each and every day around the grocery store, sometimes over amounts less than five cents. 'Why is this three cents cheaper at Food Basics?" Mental Sarcastic Bastard says: did you want me to call Food Basics and find out? Or would you prefer to spend half an hour driving there?
Another thing I have yet to understand, after almost four years in the grocery business, is why it is that I can sell a year's worth (literally) of chocolate milk when it's on sale at $.97 a litre. The regular price is $1.87 and I sell maybe 50 a week. Put it on sale and it'll sell at a rate, I kid you not, of 50 every half hour.
You know something? No matter how cheap an item is, it's not a deal if you don't regularly buy it. This logic is lost on people.
Here's another example. One flyer not all that long ago featured a certain brand of pizza...we'll call it Cardboard, at $3.00. Regular price: $3.97. Less than a dollar off. People were trying to buy twenty at a time and I'm quite certain many of those people were not regular Cardboard eaters. I found proof of this two ways: by observing the reaction when I told people, 'you know, this pizza is only $3.97 year round' ("Really? Wow, that's cheap! I never knew that!") and by observing that my sales of Cardboard have dwindled almost to nothing in the three months since. You buy cheap, you get cheap.
Stores are not above putting items in their flyers at regular price. Sales of these items double when they're 'on sale'. Even more astounding, the odd item may actually be more expensive in the flyer than its everyday shelf price. There's no law against it. And if you make that more expensive price an even number, like, say, $1.00, and you put a bunch of other things in your flyer for $1.00, just watch the fun. You'll sell up to six times the amount you would if the item was a penny cheaper.
There are obviously two kinds of customers: those who notice every last penny (and quibble over it) and a great many more who really don't seem to pay any attention to prices at all.
People ask me why the milk is always as far from the door as possible. It's because over 80% of customers walking into a grocery store will buy milk. You want them to walk as far as possible, seeing as many attractive displays as possible, before they get to their milk; you'll almost never find the bread anywhere near the milk, for the same reason.
The produce department is usually the first thing you see walking through the front door. Why? Two reasons: one, it's nice and colourful, and two, supermarkets actually make money on their produce (unlike, say, most of the grocery department...you barely break even on canned goods and you actually lose money on most dairy items.)
Items a store is trying to push, on sale or not, are often put on endcaps: those big displays at the ends of aisles. People are much more likely to notice a large display and once a customer is actually in an aisle, a kind of tunnel vision takes over as she searches for her product without really looking at anything else. That's the same reason why shelves are routinely scrambled. It's not to piss you off...it's to get you noticing (and maybe buying!) things you never noticed before.
Another place to look for deals is in bunkers, those long open chest fridges or freezers.They used to be called 'coffins', but you don't hear that term much any more...Anyway, if the item you're looking for isn't on the shelf, odds are that's because the shelf only holds one case and we're selling a case every ten minutes or so. Quite frankly, it makes no sense to assign somebody full time to stock that shelf, when there's a bunker down the way that holds twenty cases.
Something else to remember: the best deals are usually not at eye level.
Any question you have in a grocery store that starts with the word "Why"....the answer is simple: $$$. Companies pay astronomical sums to get their products on to specific shelves, with a certain number of facings mandatory...or, just as often, to get other companies out. If the brand of milk you buy is no longer available where you buy it, there's a very good chance a rival dairy offtered that store's head office more money than you can possibly imagine to make that happen. And, sadly, there's often nothing that can be done at store level. It's been my experience that the higher up mistakes are made, the longer it takes to get them (a) recognized as mistakes and (b) rectified.
I'd better stop now before I give everything away.
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