Just noticed that the 50% stickers are not always meant to be half price.

Was in Coop the other day and saw a food item (with XX gram) was labelled 50% but later in another shelf saw the exact same food item (but with ZZ gram) with no discount.

A quick calculation of the price of both the items (per 100 gram) shows that they are actually about the same price!

Before jumping the gun and call it as deceitful - Any good souls here could perhaps come up with a nice excuse for the giant retailer?

I think the 50% off sticker refers to the original price and a smaller volume product is normally more expensive. Ie 100g jar of coffee more expensive per gram than 1kg jar. As long as lower priced product was normally 50% more expensive I think it’s ok.

It's quite common that different pack sizes can have widely differing price to weight ratio. I've often seen 2*500g multi-packs of my favourite Chicco d'Oro coffee beans marked down as a special discount (not usually as much as 50%, mind) , while still being slightly more expensive than just buying the 1kg bag.

It's usually just lack of attention to detail on the part of management, IMO. In that example, they're usually side by side, so the price per kilo is obvious - if they were trying to deceive they'd surely put them in a different place to do so.

So, Caveat Emptor, of course, and if you don't always check the price per kilo then you bloody well should, and Occam's Hanlon's Razor - "never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity".

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For longer shelf life food item the larger item is surely cheaper but not more than 20 % I reckon.

The discounted item was placed in a discounted area which is far away from the usual shelf.

To put thing into perspective, that was packet ham. So we are talking about difference in a scale of 10 gram and not half a kilo or so.

So it wasn't the same brand/type/size/thickness/whatever. The point still stands, supermarket pricing isn't always completely logical, but rather than complaining that the reduced one wasn't as much reduced as you'd have liked, when compared with the other sizes on the shelf, you could maybe just learn that the some, usually larger, packs represent much better value for money than others.

The fact that the smaller pack was, presumably, near its expiry date seems to imply that many shoppers had realised this and therefore avoided buying the more expensive per kg product.

The Coop is well known for this type of thing. When they get caught, they apologise and promise to stop. And they sometimes do.

At the beginning of the lockdown I grabbed the last package of self-raising flour only to note that it was a week or two past it’s use before date. I gave it to a shelfstocker who commented that it shouldn’t be there. I returned the next day to find the same outdated package back on the shelf. Barstewards.

For certain food item there is hardly two packaging having identical weight - just like packet ham or cheese. The product usually has only one standard average price per 100g, no?

No.

If you think there's something fundamentally wrong with shops being able to charge what they think a customer will pay then I think you're living in the wrong world and/or time. Go back fifty years, and/or a continent or two away, to see the alternatives.

The fact remains, though, that your original complaint is nonsense - 50% off the marked price is what they promised, and that's what you got.

As Ace1 said, if the product has to be sold that day, there will be a sticker on it. Initially 25% often, then later that day 50% off.

Your reading comprehension skill is as twisted as the retailer it seems

Food products with an expiry date at Coop are indeed 50% off whereas non-food products discounts could be argued as misleading.

And you better stop the snarky comments

There's self-raising flour in Coop? I've always had to make up my own.

Excuse me, who started the snarky comment?

Doesnt mean you have to continue

I've noticed a few differences in pricing.

There are "regular" weekly sale prices. If you follow product pricing closely on your favorite items, you'll notice that this week's sale might claim 50% off, but it's on an arbitrarily high amount and not the price you'd normally pay. It's often marked up to make the discount look bigger.

Also, not all brands are priced the same per kilo - take Coop Family for example. That tends to be higher per kilo than if you buy Quality & Prix.

Then there are the daily stickers for food that should be sold that day. At our Coop, they mark it 50% off whatever the price was, even if it was a sale price. At our Migros, they tend to mark it 50% off regular, the non-sale price.

Stuff for the bread machine. Not sure what to call it.

I have similar experiences. For example, I noticed some weeks ago that a half empty glass was the same price as a half full glass. Total rip off. I'll never go there again.

That's why one should buy only the half full glass!

In this case it sounds like the entire line was reduced in price by 50%.

So new packaging had the new price per weight, and the old packaging did also once the 50% is taken into account.

You can argue that this is a con, and many stores have been known to do that (particularly UK furniture stores, who seemed to base their "discounts" on the price of one sofa displayed in their Thurso store for ten minutes and never actually sold - anything less than 50% off was a rip off).

On the other hand it would be worse if they'd kept the old price and you'd paid four times as much for a pack twice the size.