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Post by Baron von Lotsov on May 11, 2024 23:27:31 GMT
This thread is about cost of stuff, and it is niggling me. I know we have been here before with the water chickens, but this concerns chocolate. Go to any supermarket and you have three firms doing chocolate: Galaxy, Cadbury's and Nestle. Being a keen economist I've been studying the price of this stuff and it seems to me it has increased a fair bit. A few years back you could buy 150g for a quid, but now it is £1.50 for 100g. That's more than bloody double. First of all the 150g packs started shrinking, so they ended up as 100g packs and of course any smaller and someone might notice, so then they wazzed the price up when the press were yapping on about the Brexit problems. Another observation is all three brands work in sync like a classic oligopoly. Now I know some of you are going to try and tell me the price of coco has gone up, but there is one more thing that clinches it. How can Morrisons sell 100g of their own brand for 50p, i.e. 1/3 of the price? I chanced a purchase the other day, wary that it would be some sort of fake chocolate, but it turned out it had more chocolate in it than the other three, which seem to be pretty dilute and tasteless. I was amazed to find the 50p chocolate was noticeably better.
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Post by Ripley on May 11, 2024 23:40:47 GMT
This thread is about cost of stuff, and it is niggling me. I know we have been here before with the water chickens, but this concerns chocolate. Go to any supermarket and you have three firms doing chocolate: Galaxy, Cadbury's and Nestle. Being a keen economist I've been studying the price of this stuff and it seems to me it has increased a fair bit. A few years back you could buy 150g for a quid, but now it is £1.50 for 100g. That's more than bloody double. First of all the 150g packs started shrinking, so they ended up as 100g packs and of course any smaller and someone might notice, so then they wazzed the price up when the press were yapping on about the Brexit problems. Another observation is all three brands work in sync like a classic oligopoly. Now I know some of you are going to try and tell me the price of coco has gone up, but there is one more thing that clinches it. How can Morrisons sell 100g of their own brand for 50p, i.e. 1/3 of the price? I chanced a purchase the other day, wary that it would be some sort of fake chocolate, but it turned out it had more chocolate in it than the other three, which seem to be pretty dilute and tasteless. I was amazed to find the 50p chocolate was noticeably better. I use a lot of Belgian chocolate for baking and I have also noticed the price skyrocketing. I recall reading more than a year ago that this was predicted to happen. Read this: www.foodandwine.com/chocolate-prices-skyrocketing-8610938By the way, Amazon is selling Cadbury's 300g for £3.33, or 850g for £10. You might also consider buying in bulk if it's less expensive that way and freezing what you don't immediately want. |
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Post by piglet on May 12, 2024 7:41:47 GMT
I go Costco, it is cheaper by far, i dont know how much choc is though. If anyone wants an intro, you have to be nominated, i can do it, they will even pay me for doing it. Jack Daniels is cheap, its a rip off in the shops, a tenner or more. I stock up on toothpaste, again crazily expensive, toilet paper, coke, salami, cereals, tinned tomatoes, wine, fish, etc, its a big bill but you do save a lot.
Along the same lines i went to a pub yesterday that serves cheap dinners, hadnt been for a while, had macc and cheese, the portions were much smaller than before, i dont know how bad running a business is these days, but you cant stiff the customer forever.
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Post by johnofgwent on May 12, 2024 9:54:32 GMT
I go Costco, it is cheaper by far... My youngest has a Costco Card, i had one when i ran my own company, but we never used it much as we were too far away. On the subject of running a business, the answer is that no company has protection from electricity price rises in the way consumers do, and their bills are eye watering in wales, the labour bastards are screwing them out of various business rate reliefs for good measure. It's what you get when corbynista socialists are propped up in power by marxist ultranationalists. I think it's called "venezuela" |
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Post by ratcliff on May 12, 2024 10:05:10 GMT
This thread is about cost of stuff, and it is niggling me. I know we have been here before with the water chickens, but this concerns chocolate. Go to any supermarket and you have three firms doing chocolate: Galaxy, Cadbury's and Nestle. Being a keen economist I've been studying the price of this stuff and it seems to me it has increased a fair bit. A few years back you could buy 150g for a quid, but now it is £1.50 for 100g. That's more than bloody double. First of all the 150g packs started shrinking, so they ended up as 100g packs and of course any smaller and someone might notice, so then they wazzed the price up when the press were yapping on about the Brexit problems. Another observation is all three brands work in sync like a classic oligopoly. Now I know some of you are going to try and tell me the price of coco has gone up, but there is one more thing that clinches it. How can Morrisons sell 100g of their own brand for 50p, i.e. 1/3 of the price? I chanced a purchase the other day, wary that it would be some sort of fake chocolate, but it turned out it had more chocolate in it than the other three, which seem to be pretty dilute and tasteless. I was amazed to find the 50p chocolate was noticeably better. Does the sugar ''tax'' partly explain this? |
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Post by Baron von Lotsov on May 12, 2024 10:09:28 GMT
This thread is about cost of stuff, and it is niggling me. I know we have been here before with the water chickens, but this concerns chocolate. Go to any supermarket and you have three firms doing chocolate: Galaxy, Cadbury's and Nestle. Being a keen economist I've been studying the price of this stuff and it seems to me it has increased a fair bit. A few years back you could buy 150g for a quid, but now it is £1.50 for 100g. That's more than bloody double. First of all the 150g packs started shrinking, so they ended up as 100g packs and of course any smaller and someone might notice, so then they wazzed the price up when the press were yapping on about the Brexit problems. Another observation is all three brands work in sync like a classic oligopoly. Now I know some of you are going to try and tell me the price of coco has gone up, but there is one more thing that clinches it. How can Morrisons sell 100g of their own brand for 50p, i.e. 1/3 of the price? I chanced a purchase the other day, wary that it would be some sort of fake chocolate, but it turned out it had more chocolate in it than the other three, which seem to be pretty dilute and tasteless. I was amazed to find the 50p chocolate was noticeably better. I use a lot of Belgian chocolate for baking and I have also noticed the price skyrocketing. I recall reading more than a year ago that this was predicted to happen. Read this: www.foodandwine.com/chocolate-prices-skyrocketing-8610938By the way, Amazon is selling Cadbury's 300g for £3.33, or 850g for £10. You might also consider buying in bulk if it's less expensive that way and freezing what you don't immediately want. I've seen the pictures of destroyed cocoa plantations via too much rain. The thing is Morison's 50p chocolate cost less than the rise in price of the triopoly's products.
I think there is a lot of shitting going on here. Why does it not have climate change on Morrison's supplier's farms?
When god was deciding where to position the black clouds of climate change, did he spare Morrison's like Noah and his ark?
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Post by Dan Dare on May 12, 2024 10:16:22 GMT
There's no conundrum...  |
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Post by oracle75 on May 12, 2024 10:51:54 GMT
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Post by Baron von Lotsov on May 12, 2024 11:03:17 GMT
There's no conundrum... There never is, is there. Just look it up and all your explanations will be forthcoming, except if you thought it through. |
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Post by Dan Dare on May 12, 2024 11:25:51 GMT
Do you know of any other commodity where the global price has more than doubled in less than twelve months and buyers have declined to pass the increase on to consumers?
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Post by Baron von Lotsov on May 12, 2024 12:31:17 GMT
Do you know of any other commodity where the global price has more than doubled in less than twelve months and buyers have declined to pass the increase on to consumers? It's all irrelevant. All I needed to have done was look at the original price of the Galaxy, how much it is now and then observe the current price of Morrison's chocolate plus sampling both to check how much coca is in each, upon which I learnt the Morison's one comes top out of the four brands, but most especially I notice the contrast between Galaxy and Morrisons.
You know the way I approach it here is using the skills of a mathematician. You don't always need to know that much to be certain of the solution if you choose the way you look at it carefully.
Sometimes you find there is a good reason for the price difference between brands. Lea and Perrings sells for about £2.70, where Henderson's sells for about £1.80 and taste the same. In this case I learn Lea and Perrings contains anchovies where Henderson's is only using cheap ingredients. In the case of chocolate I understand there is some EU rule to do with chocolate can only be sold as such if it contains so much of the cocoa.
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Post by Dan Dare on May 12, 2024 12:42:59 GMT
Global commodity prices are irrelevant eh.
So if the price of a barrel of Light Brent crude were to double over the next twelve months in response to some global development you wouldn't expect the price of a gallon at the pumps to increase as well?
The retail price probably wouldn't double though since there are other factors such as margins and taxes that affect the retail price, however you wouldn't need to a brilliant mathematician to realise that the retail price has been affected.
So it is with chocolate. You seem to be having great difficulty in understanding how Morrison's own-brand chocolate can sell for less than other more popular brands. I'm not sure why, you seem a fairly intelligent bloke.
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Post by Baron von Lotsov on May 12, 2024 13:00:16 GMT
Global commodity prices are irrelevant eh. . It sounds wrong to say this, but as I was saying above, you do not always need that much information to figure the solution, and in this case my analysis does not need to know the commodity price. It's good engineering practice when designing a system that it relies on as little external information as possible. Some parameters can cancel out in an equation so do not need to be measured. If you don't need to measure it, your certainty on that is as if you used it and knew it to be 100% correct. Like say if the system were temperature dependent you need to measure the temperature, but if the system had an inbuilt positive temperature coefficient that exactly cancelled out the negative coefficient then you eliminate the temperature measurement error entirely. We do this in Morrisons when we don't know the commodity price cos we aint got no smart phone! |
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Post by Baron von Lotsov on May 12, 2024 13:58:21 GMT
Here is the maths. We have Morrison's chocolate M and Galaxy Chocolate G. We have t1, the time when Galaxy was £1 for 150g and we have time t2 which is the time of the current price where Galaxy is £1.50/100g and Morrisons is 50p. We have the cost of cocoa C and the cost of the rest of the ingredients R
We can therefore write:
M1 = MC1 + MR1 , M2 = MC2 + MR2 and ditto for the Galaxy.
We assume MC1 = GC1 and MC2 = GC2 (that's the idea of a commodity price)
Because G2 > M2 this means GR2 > MR2 & GR1 > MR1
however the problem is we obverse G2 - G1 > M2
This is the same as G2 - G1 > MC2 + MR2
(GC2 + GR2) - (GC1 + GR1) > MC2 + MR2
Remembering GC2 = MC2 we can switch
GC2 + GR2 - GC1 - GR1 > GC2 + MR2
cancel GC2 and remove brackets and adding GC1 to both sides gives
GR2 - GR1 > MR2 + GC1
So here our GR1 - GR2 is the increased profit margin, which is greater than the new Morrison's price for the rest of the ingredients and the old commodity price of the cocoa.
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Post by Red Rackham on May 12, 2024 14:09:00 GMT
This thread is about cost of stuff, and it is niggling me. I know we have been here before with the water chickens, but this concerns chocolate. Go to any supermarket and you have three firms doing chocolate: Galaxy, Cadbury's and Nestle. Being a keen economist I've been studying the price of this stuff and it seems to me it has increased a fair bit. A few years back you could buy 150g for a quid, but now it is £1.50 for 100g. That's more than bloody double. First of all the 150g packs started shrinking, so they ended up as 100g packs and of course any smaller and someone might notice, so then they wazzed the price up when the press were yapping on about the Brexit problems. Another observation is all three brands work in sync like a classic oligopoly. Now I know some of you are going to try and tell me the price of coco has gone up, but there is one more thing that clinches it. How can Morrisons sell 100g of their own brand for 50p, i.e. 1/3 of the price? I chanced a purchase the other day, wary that it would be some sort of fake chocolate, but it turned out it had more chocolate in it than the other three, which seem to be pretty dilute and tasteless. I was amazed to find the 50p chocolate was noticeably better. Slight digression, but still on 'shrinkflation'. A few weeks ago as we were putting the groceries away I noticed an item that had significantly shrunk. As I put a new box of Ritz crackers in the cupboard, next to a nearly empty box, I saw it was about two inches shorter than the old box. I took them both out of the cupboard and discovered the old box weighed 200g, the new box weighed 150g, the cost had not changed, still £1,25. The contents have been reduced by a quarter but the cost remains the same. If that's not the dictionary definition of 'rip-off', it bloody well should be. |
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