We all believe that supermarkets have the slickest, most amazing systems for processing products and delivering them to the public at competitive prices. Recently, the emphasis has been less on ‘price match before purchase' and more on ‘refunding the difference after'.
But what if parts of the Tesco purchasing team gets it so wrong that you can't even make the comparison? KitGuru puts £1 in a trolley to investigate.
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We could run this kind of story on a daily basis, but would take far too much time and the conclusion would not change.
While crucifying farmers and food production companies when it comes to regular produce and ready cooked meals, it seems that the major supermarkets fare less well when it comes to electronics.
To be specific, they regularly get arse-mastered by the main resellers like eBuyer, Scan, Aria, Overclockers, TechNextDay and the like.
We knew it happened again this morning when a deal for a high speed, 32GB, Patriot Class 10 CD card came to our attention.
Patriot is a serious memory company. They were chosen by Intel to manufacture the special memory for the official Intel Extreme Masters brand.
So what was the offer? Well the 32GB high performance card is just £14.99 from stores like eBuyer – but Tesco's noname bastard version is 33% more expensive at almost £20.
KitGuru says: The only reasons available for the huge discrepancy in price and brand value, is that either Tesco's purchasing team is getting rogered when it comes to buying technology products – or they could be doing much better, but prefer to hand out a rogering of their own in the ‘price to consumer' market.
Comment below or in the KitGuru forums.
I’m not being funny but if you go to somewhere like tesco for electronics you ALWAYS get rodgered on price!! Supermarkets take the proverbial and fleece the average consumer that doesn’t know any better.
It can be a little more subtle than that John. We’ve had cases where PC World/Currys has SMASHED the price from Tesco by a HUGE amount. The problem is more to do with the way Tesco push a ‘We are never beaten on price’ message. If they didn’t do that, then they can charge whatever they want. It’s only when a company ‘Doesn’t do what it says on the tin’ that we feel the need to highlight the issue.
I think people sometimes forget the difference between companies like tesco and ebuyer for example, tesco has stores as well as warehouses to run with staff costs to stock shelves, staff to clean the floors, direct customers to products etc, the margins will never be as competetive when compaing the two.
AF – makes you wonder what the margins on the food are like!