Category: Economy
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Yesterday I walked into ASDA and was confronted by an end-of-plinth display selling multipacks of Pepsi Max for £6.00.
The packaging wasn’t clear how many were in each pack, so I assumed there were 24. But on closer examination it turns out they were selling 30 standard cans of drink for £6.00, or 20p per can.
I was fuming!
How DARE they market a soft drink for such a ridiculously low price? Or, alternatively, how DARE they market a single can at such an extortionate price?
Multipacks always get my gander up, but this was taking it to extremes.
I do not know how much they charge for individual cans. They may not even sell them individually. But most supermarkets sell individual cans for anything between 65p and 80p each. Now, if Walmart can sell cans at 20p each and still make a profit, how much are they ripping us off when they sell individual cans?
Pepsico must produce millions of cans a day. For the sake of argument, let’s assume they produce a million cans each day. There is no difference between the cost of production of the first can and the millionth can. They all cost the same amount to manufacture. So why is the price of one can so ridiculously more expensive than if you buy 30 cans?
It does not cost Walmart any more to store them. And since I use the self-service checkouts, it doesn’t cost them any more in labour to take my money off me. So why the difference? It is obvious.
They charge that much because they can.
And that is what annoys me so much: the sheer arrogance and abuse of their monopoly-like position.
They tell us we are lucky to live in a capitalist society; lucky because we have so much choice. But the choice in most cases is whether to pay 3 times the genuine price of an item, or whether to pay 4 times its proper price.
I suggested some time ago that consumer protection legislation should be changed to prohibit this kind of marketing rip-off. It just needs a simple Act of Parliament requiring every chain of stores to market all its goods of a particular brand at the same price per unit throughout their chain. So, for example, if ASDA decide they want to sell Pepsi Max at £1.00 per litre, then cans of 330ml Pepsi Max must be sold at 33p. And 2 litre bottles have to be sold at £2.00 each.
Simple.
And if Tesco, Sainsbury or LIDL want to compete with them on price, they simply have to decide to sell the same product at a different price per litre. Consumers are no longer hoodwinked, tricked or manipulated. They are given a simple choice. And choice is good, right?
The superstores start screaming that we have taken away their right to choose how to market their produce. Not at all. They are perfectly free to choose whatever price per litre they want to sell at. Free as a bird. They just do not have the freedom to use cunning, guile and their multifarious emotional manipulations of the buying experience (euphemistically termed “marketing”) to rip off consumers.
Allowing large corporations to spend millions on manipulating ordinary people into buying things they do not want or need is not freedom. Or at least, it is not freedom for the working class to buy through transparent pricing. It is freedom for multi-national conglomerates to screw as much out of the hard-earned wages and salaries of ordinary people as they can.
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I get annoyed when politicians and their sycophants in the media speak to me as if I have the intelligence of an eight year old child. And that is exactly what they are doing when they refer to the economic policies adopted by the Tories and their Lib Dem supporters as “austerity”.
In fact even an eight year old child can see through the efforts of their parents to make cauliflower more appealing by describing it as an aeroplane and ‘flying’ it towards their closed mouth with accompanying vroom vroom noises. The eight year old and I can both see it is not an aeroplane. It is a vegetable!
Calling it an aeroplane does not make it an aeroplane. It just makes you a patronising idiot who underestimates the intelligence of your audience.
Now, back to those other patronising idiots in the field of politics and the media.
When they talk to me about austerity I know exactly what they mean. They mean cuts in the living standards, working conditions and social care for working class people. Austerity means trying to push back the advances made over many years by the working class. Austerity does not mean we are all in this together and everybody is making sacrifices to get the country ‘back on its feet’. Getting the country ‘back on its feet’ is just a euphemism for restoring the profitability of major national and international corporations.
Hardly a week goes by without a further insight into the so-called austerity the top echelons of society are not experiencing. Only this week it was reported that the average remuneration of the executives of the 100 FTSE quoted companies had risen by 11% in the last year. 11%! Did Cameron rush to the Newsnight studios to declare his outrage at this selfish, self-serving elite who are charged with imposing ‘austerity’ on their workforces. Did he heck! While their employees get less than 1% on average last year, they line their own pockets (and the coffers of the Conservative party) and bemoan the selfishness of any group of ordinary working people who dare to question the austerity myth.
While Cameron keeps his mouth shut about the greedy executives, there is no shortage of government ministers willing to speak out against hundreds of thousands of working people prepared to sacrifice a day’s wages in these hard times to defend their pension schemes from George Osborne’s raid to fund his austerity programme.
So let’s lose the ‘austerity’ label. Whenever they say austerity they mean attacking the working class. It isn’t complicated, and most people understand what is going on. But the whole media world promulgates the ruling class’s terminology.
Why? Lazy journalism? Sycophantic cosying-up to the big knobs? Or the subtle corruption of independence and principled reporting that the Leveson enquiry is bringing to light?
Ask Rupert Murdoch.
