In search of the best offers, you now need both a calculator, plenty of time and a strong memory. On a shopping trip this week, I stood in front of the shelf of sweet chili sauce. As the person who usually shops for a slightly larger Norwegian family, I was, as always, looking for the most sauce possible for the money. Usually that means choosing the biggest bottle with the lowest price per kilo. But this time I noticed a large, new sign around the price tag: “Super bonus of the week – 50 percent Trumf bonus of today’s price back as Trumf Bonus”. The price of the bottle was listed as NOK 40.60 with a black background, and below it was written “Menu more bonus”. The black background signals that something is on offer. Is this a good offer? I don’t know! Photo: Cecilie Langum Becker As I understood the sign, it could mean one of two things: either the product costs NOK 40.60 at the checkout, or it is the price I indirectly pay after getting back the 50 percent Trumf bonus. I became unsure and had to ask a shop assistant if the price only applied to Trumf members – which it turned out it didn’t. Okay. Fair enough. But is it a good offer? I don’t know. Take out the calculator Continue to the coffee capsules. There it is always three for two. The same applies to squeeze bags with quark. But how much does it save? Purely mathematically, you have to think like this: If you pay for two items, but get three, you have actually received one of the three items for free. The discount will be the share you save of the total value of the three items. Since you get one item for free, and there are three items in total, the value of the free item is 1/3 of the total value – or 33.33 percent. Norgesgruppen’s Meny stores are among the country’s most enthusiastic about 3 for 2 offers, while Kiwi in the same group drops this type of offer. Photo: Cecilie Langum Becker / news Perhaps not the world’s most difficult piece of math, but you at least have to think about it a bit. There are also variants with 5 for 4 (20 per cent) and 4 for 3 (25 per cent). The point is that it requires a lot more from you as a customer when you are standing there in the middle of a time crunch, perhaps with howling children running around. In the calculation, you must not least take into account that you might only have bought one of the item, but ended up buying three – i.e. two more than you actually needed. It’s really not good – or cheap. Full chocolate confusion Another way to price offers is to state a price offer as a percentage, so that the customer has to calculate for himself what the final price will be. news wrote earlier this month that this phenomenon is spreading in Norwegian grocery stores. Such ways of setting the price are called relative prices. This is now the most widespread form of campaign, and has become more common than the 10 and 20 kroner market. On top of this confusing deal pricing, the price of items varies widely. How much does a Freia chocolate bar actually cost? Is it 30 kroner? 40 kroner? Or maybe NOK 50? Occasionally you can find it on offer for NOK 30 per bar, but most often it is well over 40. This week you can buy three milk chocolate bars of 200 grams each for NOK 90 at all Coop stores. At Rema 1000 you can buy a milk chocolate XL bar of 240 grams for NOK 39.90. Can you see which chain has the lowest price per kilo? (The answer is a narrow victory for Coop). Because what is “cheap” and what is “expensive”? It feels completely impossible to be completely sure anymore, as the safe price references you have inside your own head become fewer and fewer. The customer is played out Nettavisen was able to show earlier this week that Rema 1000, which won Nettavisen’s price test of over 100 items before the weekend, rose sharply in price this week. Popcorn had become 67 per cent more expensive, while lightly salted cod had a 50 per cent price increase – NOK 50 more expensive per pack. A professor of political science at Høgskolen i Innlandet and Høyskolen Kristiania sums up the issue perfectly to Nettavisen: – When prices become so dynamic, it becomes completely impossible for consumers to keep up. It will be an impossible exercise to compare where it is cheapest. The customer is tricked by a sneaky combination of confusing offers and rapidly changing prices. For me as a consumer, this is about more than offers and calculations. Are we being deceived? When the prices become increasingly dynamic, and the campaigns more complex – I, as a customer, am put in a vulnerable position. It is difficult to make conscious choices when the goods do not have fixed reference points, or we constantly have to deal with discounts that require time and concentration to calculate. The constant change in price structure creates uncertainty, and makes it difficult for me to be an informed and independent customer. At a time when we are all trying to stretch our budget a little further, it shouldn’t actually be the case that we feel a bit cheated by the shops – it should be the opposite. Price transparency and simplicity should be the norm, so that we can spend our energy on more important things than interpreting what a bottle of sweet chili sauce really costs. Published 17.10.2024, at 23.11
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Now you have to be careful not to be cheated at the store – Statement
