This trick is becoming a mainstay at Food Lion. The big banner in the front window will say:
DiGiorno's Pizza — 5 for $3.99 each
It took me a second to catch the "each" but $3.99 still is a pretty good price for DiGiorno's.
The details of the deal were unusually complicated. Not complicated in a general sense, but more complicated than you might expect:
- Regular price $5.99
- Buy two for $5.49 each
- Buy three for $4.99 each
- Buy four for $4.49 each
- Buy five for $3.99 each
- Each additional pizza priced at $5.99
So to get the best unit price I needed to buy exactly five pizzas. (Which I did.)
They've done the same thing with 2-liter bottles of soda:
- Regular price $1.49
- Buy two for $0.99 each
- Buy three for $0.89 each
- Buy four for $0.75 each
- Each additional bottle priced at $1.49
Again, not complicated in the global sense, but missing the last line in the deal costs a bit.
Wegmans has adopted a similar pricing tactic since the 1980s (as far back as I remember, anyway). Their cash registers were sophisticated enough at the time that they could advertise "Buy One, Get One Free" and actually price the items that way at the register. "Buy One, Get One Free" is not the same thing as "50% Off." Some places treated them the same (and still do) but not Wegmans: If we bought just one, we paid full price.
What Food Lion is doing now, at the root, is just limiting the quantity of loss leader items that can be purchased. But the wording is a little bit different than "Limit Five" I imagine they'll make more money on people who buy ten pizzas and not realize until they get home that they paid full price for half of them.
Caveat emptor.
Here's one I ran up against at my store last week. My regular Bob's Red Mill Thick-Cut Rolled Oats that I eat for breakfast every morning, was moved from the cereal aisle to the health food aisle. Evidently this "upgrade" was worth raising the price .60! Crazy.
You have to be careful with the deals they offer. Also a lot of times they have special deals, but only if you have the savers card from the supermarket. Sometimes if you go somewhere else you may not realize and it can cost more.
Craig
http://www.budgetpulse.com
Check the price per unit, too. Sometimes a smaller size will actually cost less per unit than a larger size.
Walgreens is the same way – sometimes I only want one candy bar, but they are on sale 2 for $1 (or some such) – kinda pains me to buy just one at an inflated prize, but then again I don't want two – why can't one be 50¢!
Agree with all of these, big-time!
I've found that doing all your shopping at one store is a really bad idea. Know your stores — most of them are consistently lower on some items and higher than others. The Food Lion here is almost always 10-20 % higher on coffee, orange juice and ice cream than the Giant, but is often cheaper on a number of other items. Even Wal-Mart (which is allowed to include a supermarket section here) — it has great prices on a lot of things (the package of hot dogs that is $5 or more elsewhere is under $3, as just one example), but you do *not* want to buy tuna fish there except on their rare "roll-back's." With a little knowledge and planning, you can beat the system!
I've had this happen to me before. I like it when stores do per unit pricing on buy get one free offers so in th event I only need one item I get it at 50% off.
I remember at Safeways I always used to think that "3 for $6" meant you had to buy 3 to get the $5 total price – but you don't! If you just buy 1, it is $2.
Of course, the psychology is such that many people buy 3 at a time, giving the store more profit through volume.
But your example is much worse!
Thanks for the info, I am learning how to be frugal, in every way I can. And you need to watch the cash register when it is ringing up, since sometimes what you know it to cost, and the cost that rings up aren't the same. You know it is on sale, the sign said so, but they haven't put into the machine yet, in some places.
I hate being the one to keep the line waiting while they have someone go to check. Like why would someone lie about something like that? I have had that happen.
Here in the Northwest, the Kroger unit known as QFC regularly has a 10 for 10 bucks sale on many fine grocery items that we regularly buy. And – if you want just one, hey, it's a buck, that's how it works. Now, you have join their "Savings Club", which is free, so they have your name and phone number, but I definitely don't care about that.
I always watch the register – the folks who set the (often daily) cost changes don't necessarily get all their changes migrated to the field. I don't think there's (generally) any lying involved – just minor system failures that require us – the consumer – to be more vigilant.
Cathy is right, the larger-size-has-higher-unit-price thing happens more often than I had expected, so unit prices are worth checking.
Also I usually visit three or four stores in a week to pick up loss leaders. Sometimes the store you shop least has unexpected bargains at much better prices than anywhere else.
pay close attention to the unit prices. I am finding them to be inaccurate. ie: the unit price per ounce does not match the ounces in the package. When comparing products one unit price may be figured per ounce while the same product from a different manufacurer is figure by the pound, quart etc. I have been tricked into buying the more expensive product.The pre cut bags of lettuce were on sale. I checked the unit price for the 22oz. bag containing the 3 roman heart and the 12oz. bags of pre cut lettuce. with the sale price the unit price for the pre cut lettuce was cheaper. When I looked closer I noticed the roman hearts unit price was based on a 12oz. package not 22oz. The 3 roman hearts never come in a 12 oz pkg. Since the roman hearts were next to the pre cut lettuce, do you think this was an honest mistake or another way to trick people into buying the more expensive item?
I was shopping at the Copps Food Center today and ran into examples of two common problems I've noticed with unit pricing in many grocery stores. (I don't mean to pick on Copps Food Center, I've noticed these problems at lots of different stores.)
The first problem is the one Debbie just pointed out. It smacks of false advertising but to be fair is probably more likely due either to clerical error or to unit price labels lagging product downsizing . It's when the package quantity on the shelf's unit price label does not match the quantity of the package. The specific case I noticed at Copps today is for a bag of Kettle Cooked cracked pepper flavor potato chips. The shelf's unit price label indicates 16 ounces and, as you'd expect, the unit price (price per ounce) on the label is based on a 16 ounce package size. But the label is for a 14 ounce bag! The unit price is wrong! It gives the impression that the chips are less expensive than they really are.
The second problem is more common. I often see a lack of consistency in the units used for unit pricing. This is more a case of sloppiness than inaccurate labeling, but it still renders the unit price worthless. The example I noticed at Copps today involved three different size choices for bags of Kit Kat candy bars. Each bag choice not only had a different number of candy bars, but the candy bars themselves were different sizes. Two of the bags had a unit price based on price per "package" ("package" meaning candy bar, not the whole bag) but the candy bars were not the same size! To make things even more confusing, the third bag had a unit price based on ounces. So, bag size A has a per-candy-bar unit price for a big candy bar, bag size B has a per-candy-bar unit price for a smaller candy bar, and bag size C has a cost per ounce unit price. If the units aren't the same, why bother with unit prices at all?