Tuesday, June 03, 2008

Sainsburys squeeze the price of tea – an answer (of sorts) that points back to the supplier (Cafedirect)

Sainsburys eventually got around to responding to the great tea bag scandal. They point to Cafedirect’s pricing – sounds like the wholesale price of the small boxes of Teadirect is particularly competitive!

Thank you for your email about the price of Teadirect teabags in our stores. Please accept my apologies for the length of time it has taken me to respond.

Please let me assure you that we know price is very important to our customers and we monitor around 15,000 lines weekly to ensure we remain competitive. I do understand your concerns about the price of the large box of these teabags.

Sainsburys have an intriguing pricing policy when it comes to boxes of Teadirect tea bags

At the moment, due to supplier costs, we cannot lower the price of the larger box. However, we will also not increase the price of the smaller pack as this would be unfair to our customers.

Given the seeming long-term nature of the pricing – Sainsburys have been running with a favouring-small-boxes policy for some time, reflecting the Cafedirect wholesale pricing to Sainsburys - maybe it’s time for an ethical supermarket to run down its stock of large and overpriced boxes, and only stock the small ones.

After all, that would ensure that their customers always get the best value ... and would be unable to be ripped off by choosing the large box without checking the price differential.

Just like the Post Office thread, suspect that’s the last you’ll hear about tea bags for a while.

No comments: