Do you find Waitrose’s 3 for 2 offers confusing?

No point in buying something you don’t need! I’ve a nectar card – rarely use it but it has, over the years, accumulated around £27 which I assume one day I will get round to spending. A pity there is not a cash alternative. Remember GreenShield stamps? I think you could redeem those at the rate of around a million for a penny if you didn’t shoose a gift.

The 3 for 2 is not uncommon – Boots (the Chemist) at Christmas and other times for example. The system should group products onto 3s where two higher priced ones yield a “free” lower priced one, but done in appropriate groups. So the example given in the intro should have yielded a £4 saving.

What matters to me is what I spend overall on my (well, mrs r’s) shop. Unit prices are useful, but not relevant when buying offers if the items become cheaper than their normal unit price – a saving is being made.

I still have some Green Shield stamps in case they make a come-back! I seem to accumulate quite a lot of Nectar points at BP and Homebase and let them build up until December when they ease the Christmas shopping bill. Sainsbury’s halved the redemption rate a few months ago so they are not worth going out of your way for. I would far sooner go back to straightforward honest pricing.

I also remember the political storm over the abolition of Resale Price Maintenance – one of the few things for which Alec Douglas-Home’s short government was memorable. It was pushed through Parliament by Edward Heath as President of the Board of Trade, split the Tory party, upset the small traders, and led to the ultimate dominance of big supermarkets whose bulk-buying deals could undercut the market.

I don’t know how the Boots system works at Christmas-time but on an everyday basis it is annoying. If you try to buy three groups of three products in the deal the system ignores this at the checkout and merely takes the three bottom-priced items out of the nine selected and gives them free. If you want to make the sort of savings the offer is enticing you with you have to go round three times and pay separately each time. We hardly ever go to Boots nowadays since it is no longer competitive and its own-label products are now generally inferior.

I am confident that Sainsbury’s computer will be able to cope with the order that items are scanned, John. I take your point about people with little money or no car to transport their money-saving bulk purchases but I’m most concerned about the amount of fresh food that gets wasted because of BOGOF deals. I believe that Aldi and Lidl avoid all this carry on and it’s hardly surprising that their market share is increasing, though I don’t have much personal experience.

I agree with you on food waste Wavechange. We buy a lot of fruit at this time of the year and the supermarkets seem to overstock the displays with items with three or four days’ before the ‘best before’ or ‘use by’ date. People seem to instinctively go for the longer-dated produce leaving the stuff that is ripe to eat in the next 24-hours unsold. We prefer short-dated fruit because it is nearly ripe and we only buy enough for immediate needs. I suppose we are in a fortunate position that we can easily buy some more tomorrow and the day after whereas some people have to [or like to] get a week’s supply in one go. I still feel that the unnecessary desire to present an abundance of fruit as a temptation is the cause of so much waste.

I thought one of the good points about Morrison’s provision of a decent cafeteria in their bigger supermarkets was that they were able to use up left-overs from the shop, especially vegetables. Their deli counters are also creative with their salads to avoid waste. I’m not sure the other big supermarkets see their caffs and delis in that light.

I agree with you on food waste Wavechange. We buy a lot of fruit at this time of the year and the supermarkets seem to overstock the displays with items with three or four days’ before the ‘best before’ or ‘use by’ date. People seem to instinctively go for the longer-dated produce leaving the stuff that is ripe to eat in the next 24-hours unsold. We prefer short-dated fruit because it is nearly ripe and we only buy enough for immediate needs. I suppose we are in a fortunate position that we can easily buy some more tomorrow and the day after whereas some people have to [or like to] get a week’s supply in one go. I still feel that the unnecessary desire to present an abundance of fruit as a temptation is the cause of so much waste.

I thought one of the good points about Morrison’s provision of a decent cafeteria in their bigger supermarkets was that they were able to use up left-overs from the shop, especially vegetables. Their deli counters are also creative with their salads to avoid waste. I’m not sure the other big supermarkets see their caffs and delis in that light.

I don’t know how or why that comment got duplicated – I received an “Unexpected Token D” message. Leaves on the line I suppose.

You are so ‘last century’, Derek – A man from Waitrose in a suit and tie brings it round nowadays and leaves it in the boot room. The butler picks out the silver polish and liquors, the maids distribute the rest. Things will have to change now we’re leaving the EU – just won’t be able to get the staff. Waitrose are late this morning – Telegraph not yet arrived.

In my experience Waitrose are competitive on like-for-like products and on many branded goods. They have a reputation for priciness because they offer a large number of more upmarket groceries, dairy and deli products and some of the more sophisticated cuts of meat, fish, fruit and vegetables. But if you stick to the food you would buy in any other supermarket – and avoid the ‘added value’ lines – your shopping basket price will be as close as makes no difference. The same applies to M&S Food – you don’t have to buy the more flavoursome choices as the plain vanilla ones are very good quality and value. Of course, temptation is a popular weakness and the retailers know how to lead us there.

Quality of food matters as well as price, if you enjoy eating. That doesn’t mean it has to be expensive. Rump is my preferred steak because it has flavour, but buy cheap and it can be like shoe leather. Buy from a reputable shop and it will have both texture and flavour.

Perhaps Waitrose think most of their customers have nothing else to do all day [and to some extent they might be right by all appearances!] . They might also assume – with some justification – that their customers either (a) are more able to work out the best deals than the customers of other shops, or (b) don’t take any notice of the price anyway. I agree with you about Sainsbury’s: shopping there has been at least as pleasurable as going to Waitrose and I think they are quietly creeping into Waitrose’s market position – which might be why Waitrose are getting in a flap.

I don’t enjoy shopping for my bits and pieces in a vast superstore which often involves a longer journey and pushing a trolley round and round miles of elongated corridors and searching for my itemised list of shopping amongst long rows of shelves for it; rather like looking for a needle in a haystack, which only adds to the stress, confusion and fatigue of my fortnightly shopping experience.

Waitrose is my nearest supermarket in both directions so I not only save on petrol getting there, I also enjoy the adequate space and size, the clean and fresh ambiance, and now the ‘free’ coffee even though that involves buying a pastry or cake to accompany it which I will sometimes wrap up in the napkin provided and take home with me for eating later on in the day. If their pricing and offers confuse, why not pop a calculator into your pocket or handbag to assist with the price offers?

We are fortunate to have such a wide choice of places and prices to shop but it’s been my personal experience over the years that food buying in a cheaper store usually results in buying much more than I intended, or even needed and exceeding my original budget.

Could that be one of the many reasons for the high rate of obesity in this country? Food for thought, if not for money being the motto here!

I agree with you, Beryl.

Waitrose respond to a different demographic to that pursued by the “cheaper stores” to which you allude and I think the way they present food reflects that. They don’t seem to major on the aisles full of crisps, snacks and sugary drinks and cereals that others do. They sell the same popular products [mostly] but in lesser volumes so they are not so prominent. It is instinctive retail psychology to allocate the best spaces to the highest-selling lines and it becomes self-reinforcing. And because the Waitrose customer tends to have a preference for the healthier choices and more natural foodstuffs, these are more noticeable on the shelves. These values are also dynamically conditioning their customers a bit like compound interest. Waitrose therefore becomes alien territory to those who think their food is both expensive and not enjoyable. This makes Waitrose even more appealing to the sensible shopper who appreciates their style and disdains the other supermarkets [and by extension, perhaps, the people who prefer shopping there]. I am not suggesting that you feel like that, Beryl, as you made it perfectly clear that you shop at Waitrose because it is the nearest. I find the psychology around shopping rather fascinating, especially how some of our biggest corporations lose the plot and drift into positions and policies that bear no relation to their original business plans.

I shop at Waitrose because the store and staff are pleasant, in general the quality is good and if there is something wrong there’s never a problem getting it sorted out. I’m not wealthy but, like others who have posted here, I stick to the standard offerings and I’m shameless about rummaging through the reduced items! However, I do agree with Alice about the ‘Pick Your Own Offers’ scheme. I’m always dubious about offers that expect you to jump through hoops – as if my time has no value – but I’ve got a some other issues with this one:
– they tell you that you can change your selection 10 times a month, but this isn’t strictly true. I changed two of mine yesterday and a message came up saying I could make 8 more changes before the end of the month – in other words, you can’t change your entire range 10 times a month, you can just change 10 individual items.
– when you are making your choice, they tell you the current price and the price with 20% off, but they don’t say if the current price is a special offer. If you want a product but you don’t care which brand, you can easily select one because the 20% off makes it cheaper than other brands; then you start buying that brand because it’s your chosen offer, only to find you’re paying more because the special offer has ended.
– the products available under the PYO offer tend to be the more expensive ones and there is often a cheaper alternative, e.g. I had the bag of large oranges in my selection until I realised that, after you’d peeled them, the fruit inside was no bigger than the “ordinary” ones which, even without 20% off, are cheaper.
– it might be my imagination, but I’ve noticed hefty price rises on some of the products I’d selected; the one I remember in particular was salmon fillets, where the price of a pack of 2 went up so much that even with the 20% off it was still cheaper pro rata to buy a pack of 4 (I put the extra 2 in the freezer).
So in my list I have a few things that I buy nearly every week, and if I’m planning to buy something particularly pricey I will look at the PYO choices to see if it’s available, but I’m certainly not devoting a lot of my time to this exercise!