Titanic Tea - prices vary, but you may want to avoid buying any in the Belfast Welcome Centre - updated with news of a price reduction

Although Belfast boat factories constructed hundreds of ships, one seems to have dominated the headlines! So needing to bring a small gift across to the US I decided that some Titanic merchandise would be appropriate: a book about the shipyard and the people who built the ill-fated liner, and a bag of Titanic tea.

Belfast Welcome Centre seemed like a good place to pick up Titanic tat until I choked at the £5.99 price for 80 locally blended tea bags.

Tesco proved a lot cheaper at £2.29 - though this was still 20-40p more expensive than other similar packets of non-Titanic branded tea.

I challenged a member of staff at the Welcome Centre about their exorbitant pricing - nearly three times the price of Tesco. "It's even dearer down in Titanic Belfast" he said.

So I checked out his claim - not true.

A quick shifty in the Titanic Belfast gift shop turned up the same tea bags for a modest £2.99 - half the price of the Welcome Centre.

While it's conceivable that the Welcome Centre don't sell too many boxes of tea - particularly at that price - the uncompetitive pricing seems a complete rip off, and one that takes advantages of tourists rather than offering value.

Update - around lunchtime, the Welcome Centre dropped their price to match Titanic Belfast!

VAT rise effects – 5p on my cup of tea

So the price of a cup of tea went up in our canteen this morning, a hike from 55p to 60p. Coffee drinkers will have noticed a rise too.

The VAT increase from 17.5% to 20% should only have added a penny or so to the price of a cup of tea. The above-VAT increase is partially justified by not increasing the price of most of the other items on sale in the canteen. However, it’s bad news if all you ever eat is tea and a scone. And I don’t remember the VAT reduction (when it went down from 17.5% to 15%) being passed on to canteen users in the same way.

The broader question is … has the price of your regular cup of tea or coffee increased today?

Drop a comment and let me know the price, how much it’s gone up by, and where you get it and I’ll post a summary in a day or so.

(Photo used under licence from chumsdock on Flickr.)

Order restored to the cosmos - tea bag pricing restored to sensible prices

Don't worry - it's just a one-off reprieve for the tea bag thread.

Wandering around Secret Sainsburys the other afternoon with someone wanting to look for PG Tips tea bags, I noticed that they'd reduced the price of the large boxes of Teadirect tea.

Quick recap if you're new here :: Sainsburys (and Tescos) have been selling the 160 bag boxes of Teadirect at more than double the price of the smaller 80 bag boxes ... so it was costing around £1 more for a single box containing 160 bags than 2 boxes of 80.

So along with the end of the Doctor Who series, order has been restored in the cosmos with a fair and equitable pricing policy. Hooray! Buying in bulk once again saves you money ... 5p at the moment.

Time for a nice cup of tea.

Sainsburys squeeze the price of tea – an answer (of sorts) that points back to the supplier (Cafedirect)

Sainsburys eventually got around to responding to the great tea bag scandal. They point to Cafedirect’s pricing – sounds like the wholesale price of the small boxes of Teadirect is particularly competitive!

Thank you for your email about the price of Teadirect teabags in our stores. Please accept my apologies for the length of time it has taken me to respond.

Please let me assure you that we know price is very important to our customers and we monitor around 15,000 lines weekly to ensure we remain competitive. I do understand your concerns about the price of the large box of these teabags.

At the moment, due to supplier costs, we cannot lower the price of the larger box. However, we will also not increase the price of the smaller pack as this would be unfair to our customers.

Given the seeming long-term nature of the pricing – Sainsburys have been running with a favouring-small-boxes policy for some time, reflecting the Cafedirect wholesale pricing to Sainsburys - maybe it’s time for an ethical supermarket to run down its stock of large and overpriced boxes, and only stock the small ones.

After all, that would ensure that their customers always get the best value ... and would be unable to be ripped off by choosing the large box without checking the price differential.

Just like the Post Office thread, suspect that’s the last you’ll hear about tea bags for a while.

Tea bag farce worsens

Without wanting to wind up a previous anonymous commenter, the long-running tea bag saga has just got sillier. Shopping in Secret Sainsburys on Monday threw up a new twist in the quest to find out why are two small boxes cheaper than double sized box of tea?

There's a new promotion on at the moment. And Sainsburys have knocked 50p off the price of both the 80 bag and the 160 bag boxes of Teadirect, further accentuating the already weird pricing.

Reducing the 80 bag boxes to 92p and the 160 bag boxes to £3.35. So a big box is double the size and more than three and a half times as expensive.

• 67p for 100g (when you buy 160 bags)
• 36.8p for 100g (when you buy 80 bags)
• Exactly the same product.

Now that's just stupid.

(Sainsburys haven't replied to the email sent to their Customer Services yet, though when chased they did acknowledge that they were working on a reply.) Update - 3 June - they replied.

Tesco replied

Two down, one to go on the tea bag front. Though there's not a lot of light in the responses.

Tesco replied on Thursday night with a short, succinct summary of how they see the great Teadirect injustice.

I have looked in to this for you in conjunction with our research department and can confirm that the 80 bag box of tea is on a special offer price at the moment.

I hope this helps explain things for you.

So only Sainsburys has yet to reply ... though really none of the firms have engaged with the problem. (Update - Sainsburys did eventually reply on 3 June.)

Cafedirect replied in the tea bag saga - nothing yet from Sainsburys or Tesco

Cafedirect replied ...

I would like to confirm that although Cafedirect has recommended retail prices, we have absolutely no control over the price that the Supermarkets then decide to sell our products at.

I apologise that I cannot be of further assistance.

But nothing of substance yet from Sainsburys or Tesco customer service. (Update - Tesco have now replied - 3 June - and Sainsburys too.)

Funny pricing of tea bags – the saga continues

Last Saturday I was perturbed by the continuing pricing anomalies to teadirect tea bags in Sainsburys. 2 x 80 bags boxes are £1.01 cheaper than a 160 bag box.

Now the internet has a social benefit in keeping pedants (who, me?) off the streets and out of shops. But every now and again, we escape into the community and are faced with pricing incongruities in supermarkets.

Now I’m aware that FairTrade and environmentally-friendly are different bandwagons. But they’re often related, and shared concerns when it comes to shoppers. So being charged £1.01 for less cardboard (one big box having less surface area than two smaller boxes) seems to encourage customers to be wasteful. That sounds like a £1 pure profit from unsuspecting shoppers.

(And I’m also conscious that supermarkets rightly come under pressure from people living alone who don’t want to have to buy in huge bulk to get a decent prices for foodstuffs. Though tea bags have very long best before dates.)

Stephen Barnes commented on last week’s post:

“A deliberate ruse, IMHO. Shoppers instinctively think the larger box will be cheaper and just go ahead and lift the dearer product. It's not just Sainsburys that do this either....”

Anyway, a quick survey of local supermarkets today shows

• £1.42 (80) £3.85 (160) - Sainsburys (Holywood Exchange)
• £1.42 (80) £3.85 (160) - Tesco (Knocknagoney)
• £1.59 (80) £3.85 (160) - Sainsburys (Forestside)

Some observations:

• Sainsburys Customer Service desk at Holywood Exchange find it odd that the price of the larger boxes is so expensive.
• After three attempts, Tesco Customer Services managed to raise someone from the tea/coffee section who explained that I needed to shop carefully, and keep my eyes open, to make sure I wasn’t ripped off. He did promise to mention it to Pricing Control - who set the prices each store has to implement and display.
  
• The two competing East Belfast supermarkets (Holywood Exchange and Knocknagoney) have identical prices;
• Sainsburys at Holywood Exchange is cheaper than the larger branch at Forestside.

And the normally “premium” pay-a-few-pence-extra Marks and Spencer turns out to be the real bargain, with boxes of 160 tea bags going for £2.09.

So perhaps it’s time for a letter to CafeDirect (who are behind teadirect), Sainsburys and Tesco to ask whether they support their customers getting ripped off when they buy a bigger box, expecting to save money rather than waste a pound. (Update - three emails sent, will report back if there's any response. Further update - CafeDirect and Tesco have replied. Update - 3 June - Sainsburys too.)

Sainsburys – old strudel & funny pricing of tea bags

If there was a Supermarkets Anonymous, I’d have to introduce myself with

I’m Alan and I’m unnaturally fond of Sainsburys.

Well, at least a fan of the Secret Sainsburys branch down in Holywood Exchange. Now that Ikea has opened, it’s less of a secret and the car park is a lot busier. Sometimes it’s because people are avoiding the chance of a queue for Ikea’s car park and are prepared to walk the last quarter of a mile. But it also feels a bit busier inside the store, with more people aware that it’s there.

There are definite plus points:

• The petrol is nearly always a penny cheaper than Tesco at Knocknagoney.
• The café stays open longer than Tesco and serves decent hot food. And Littl’un has a serious packet-of-three-mini-muffins habit that will probably require therapy later in life!
• B&Q is only a couple of minutes walk away when you need to combine shopping trips.

Like all large stores and enterprises, it’s far from perfect. The mark of good service is what happens when something goes wrong.

We’d folk coming for lunch today. Apple strudel and ice cream seemed like a good dessert. (Would have been better if I’d remembered to put it into the oven earlier!) As well as plain apple, the mixed berries strudel caught my eye. But when I got home, I noticed that the date on the box was August 2007.

Driving back to Sainsburys, the customer service desk happily gave a refund, surprised and quite disappointed that an out-of-date product had been left on the shelves. I popped across to find a replacement, finding some more August 2007 boxes, January 2008 boxes as well as plenty that were still within their date. The replacement strudel was free, and the someone was being dispatched to clear away the old stock as I was leaving.

Earlier, during the original shopping trip, one of Sainsburys pricing anomalies caught my eye again. You’d expect that larger boxes would be proportionately cheaper than small ones. But for months, it’s been cheaper to buy two boxes of 80 teadirect tea bags than a single 160 bag box.

2 x £1.42 as opposed to 1 x 3.85 – a saving of £1.01.

Even if the bigger box should have been priced a pound lower, it’s still a penny more expensive that the smaller ones.

I’ve mentioned it to staff at least three times over the months, but the pricing hasn’t (yet) changed.