The Lemon Fool

I have just been to the Co-Op.

Main:
Onion Bhaji & Mango Chutney sandwich: £3.45;
Snack:
Ginsters Cornish Pasty (180g): £2.00;
Drink:
Innocent Super Smoothie: strawberry, cherry, apple, guarana & flax seeds with vitamins (300ml): £2.95.

Total: £8.40.
Meal Deal price: £4.00.

Do you think I got a bargain or do you think that the prices were such a rip-off to begin with that I paid a fair price (or was still ripped off)?


Julian F. G. W.

jfgw wrote:I have just been to the Co-Op.

Main:
Onion Bhaji & Mango Chutney sandwich: £3.45;
Snack:
Ginsters Cornish Pasty (180g): £2.00;
Drink:
Innocent Super Smoothie: strawberry, cherry, apple, guarana & flax seeds with vitamins (300ml): £2.95.

Total: £8.40.
Meal Deal price: £4.00.

Do you think I got a bargain or do you think that the prices were such a rip-off to begin with that I paid a fair price (or was still ripped off)?


Julian F. G. W.

Is there an option for "being slightly manipulated"?

I can't imagine anyone made a loss
- or that many customers don't engage in deals like this for this stuff

So the whole thing feels a bit fake "closing down" rug sale

But as long as you are happy .. that's a win!

With that meal, I think they are assuming you will be increasing your funeral pre-payments by £4.40 a day, due to your unhealty diet.

I always think the prices of the small Innocent drink bottles are obscene and would never buy them unless part of a meal deal or such.

Indeed, even in the supermarket I only buy them when on offer (one such fruit drink is always on offer so I simply buy that as I’m not wedded to a given brand).

I’m surprised a Cornish Pasty classed as a snack - which meant I was tempted to reply I think you should have bought something with less calories bit I’d suspect they more like £1.20 a pop in the supermarket.

The fact all mini supermarkets, Boots, WH Smith’s, Greggs etc do a similar sort of offer probably serves to limit the overall price that can be charged for a meal deal to around that £4 level

the0ni0nking wrote:I always think the prices of the small Innocent drink bottles are obscene and would never buy them unless part of a meal deal or such.

Indeed, even in the supermarket I only buy them when on offer (one such fruit drink is always on offer so I simply buy that as I’m not wedded to a given brand).

Yes I bought a 400ml bottle of "Easy Greens" from Pret yesterday at Waterloo and was rather shocked to be charged £4.10 for it.

My mood was not elevated when I further noted that it was 25% coconut water and 24% cucumber".

These meal deals have been around for a long time. Starting out as something pretty basic: sandwich + sweet, crisps or fruit + soft drink, but improving from there. Before lockdown, some of them had got very good indeed, headed by Tesco but with the Coop hard on its heels. Though not everyone: Sainsburys never went upmarket, and M&S would charge £4.50 for a meal utterly inferior to Tesco's £3 or Coop £3.50. Now alas most of the best options for a main course and snack seem to have disappeared from the menu, leaving just the smoothie from the more 'interesting' options of five years ago.

The Ginsters Cornish pasty (ugh ) is a negative value - should have been priced at minus £2, not plus. (My nephew worked there once, and hasn't touched one ever since, never mind eaten one.)

So the £4.00 meal deal price is actually only 40p wide of the right price. Hope that helps.

Whereas the memories of the onion bhaji sandwich will be yours to savour for the rest of the day, with repeat instalments at half-hourly intervals. Enjoy!

BJ

My take:

I don't feel ripped off but I think that the individual items are overpriced. Any two of those items would have cost more than all three.

I appreciate that there are costs involved and these have to be covered. I would not expect to get the sandwich for, say, a pound even though the ingredients probably cost a fraction of that.

I don't think I would have bought that smoothie on its own at £2.95. On the ingredients list, pressed apples comes first (50%), followed by 13 pressed grapes and half of a mashed banana. The dash of guarana infusion (0.01%) is listed after the vitamins; the actual guarana content will be miniscule. This may be just as well as guarana should not be taken by children, pregnant women, anyone with stomach or gut ulcers, people with heart problems including high blood pressure and heart arrhythmia, or those with an overactive thyroid (source: https://www.hollandandbarrett.com/the-health-hub/vitamins-and-supplements/supplements/what-is-guarana/).

bungeejumper wrote:The Ginsters Cornish pasty (ugh ) is a negative value - should have been priced at minus £2, not plus. (My nephew worked there once, and hasn't touched one ever since, never mind eaten one.)

I suspect that the same applies to a lot of food items. If you spent a few days in the factory before deciding whether to buy something, you, in many cases, wouldn't buy it. There are probably a lot of restaurants that you wouldn't go to either if you had worked in the kitchen first.


Julian F. G. W.

jfgw wrote:Meal Deal price: £4.00.

The notion that this constitutes a 'meal' illustrates why much of the population is so F A T.
Not your goodself of course.

V8

jfgw wrote:I suspect that the same applies to a lot of food items. If you spent a few days in the factory before deciding whether to buy something, you, in many cases, wouldn't buy it.

Indeed, they always say that politics and sausage manufacturing are two processes that you might wish not to have witnessed at close quarters.

There are probably a lot of restaurants that you wouldn't go to either if you had worked in the kitchen first.

There certainly are, and it was always thus. More than 50 years ago, one of my friends worked in the kitchens at one of Paris's most famous Michelin-starred restaurants. All the waiters there were communists, exactly the way that George Orwell had described in the 1930s! And when the chief executive of some mighty corporation came in for a meal, he could be assured that the kitchen staff had given his plate some (ahem) special attention.

Similarly described in the annals of Barry McKenzie, as I recall. The origins of the phrase "pointing percy at the patisserie" are lost in Australian history.

BJ

ISTM that the labelling has improved so that it is clearer what constitutes a genuine part of the meal deal. There was a time when on every occasion I bought what I thought was the deal, I went to the checkout (manned or auto) to discover I had inadvertantly chosen an item not included in the deal, so that the required discounts did not apply. Cue for much argument and raised voices, and leaving the queue while I insisted a member of staff accompany me to chose appropriate items.

Nimrod103 wrote:ISTM that the labelling has improved so that it is clearer what constitutes a genuine part of the meal deal. There was a time when on every occasion I bought what I thought was the deal, I went to the checkout (manned or auto) to discover I had inadvertantly chosen an item not included in the deal, so that the required discounts did not apply. Cue for much argument and raised voices, and leaving the queue while I insisted a member of staff accompany me to chose appropriate items.

I've had this happen... got to the till and found one of the items wasn't in the meal day. I got the spotty youth to get me a replacement item, which he did, but I noticed he put the incorrect item back in with the meal deals

bungeejumper wrote:Indeed, they always say that politics and sausage manufacturing are two processes that you might wish not to have witnessed at close quarters.

Without Googling, I think it is something more like "Laws and sausages are two things you really should avoid seeing made."!

Ok I Googled it!

"Laws are Like Sausages. Better Not to See Them Being Made"

~ Otto Von Bismarck ~

Mike4 wrote:

bungeejumper wrote:Indeed, they always say that politics and sausage manufacturing are two processes that you might wish not to have witnessed at close quarters.

Without Googling, I think it is something more like "Laws and sausages are two things you really should avoid seeing made."!

Having worked in a meat factory as a student, I can assure you that making sausages is nothing compared to making faggots and black pudding!


Steve

stevensfo wrote:

Mike4 wrote:
Without Googling, I think it is something more like "Laws and sausages are two things you really should avoid seeing made."!

Having worked in a meat factory as a student, I can assure you that making sausages is nothing compared to making faggots and black pudding!


Steve

Lol, I always imagine what goes into those is all the unsalable parts of the animal that don't look like recognisable meat, passed through some sort of mincer and turned into a coarse paste.

Mike4 wrote:

stevensfo wrote:
Having worked in a meat factory as a student, I can assure you that making sausages is nothing compared to making faggots and black pudding!


Steve

Lol, I always imagine what goes into those is all the unsalable parts of the animal that don't look like recognisable meat, passed through some sort of mincer and turned into a coarse paste.

Faggots were exactly that, with a lot of strong flavouring and disgusting sauce that turned into a gel when cool.

Black pudding was simply fat and blood with flavouring. Revolting to watch being chopped and mixed. I regret it was before we had affordable camcorders. It would have made a great scene in an amateur horror movie!

Steve

Mike4 wrote:Lol, I always imagine what goes into those is all the unsalable parts of the animal

Dogfood, catfood. The best of what your pet gets may be actual meat that can't be sold to humans, but most of it isn't.