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Supermarket Weep (Dale Winton might)

This is just a sense I get. I’d like to know if it is all in my mind, or if you feel the same about what ‘To Clear’ means? Does Tesco really think I want to buy a rather brown looking steak, which I would only buy for a special occasion, when it costs me over £6, and needs to be eaten that evening?

Meagre Percentage

Who’s doing this clearing? They take a meagre percentage off items that are still expensive and think we’ll buy them on the use by date. Was it always like this or is it just because it’s still only the morning? How many of these items end up going unsold into the waste bin?

These are evidently items that don’t jump off the shelves into your shopping basket as the same culprits always seem to be there. The roast chicken in plastic packaging is there, still with its ‘Buy 2 for £5’ sticker, Reduced to Clear to £2.55.

Therefore if you bought 2 of these packages of chicken pieces from Reduced To Clear, you’d pay £5.10 whereas you can buy 2 for £5 from the normal shelf and have a week left before the use by date, or you could pop them in the freezer.

For me to buy  something that passes its sell by date that day, I want to see at least 30 or 40 percent off its original price.

The Usual Suspects Reduced to 'Clear'.

The usual suspects that end up in the reduced bin – chicken chunks, expensive meats, fish, fish sauce (always the last to go) pizzas, ham and pate from the deli, lasagna and ready meal curries – are items I rarely choose. There are items I regularly buy which never get represented in Reduced To Clear.

There was a time when a sandwich that retails at over £2 would be reduced to under a £1, sometimes down to ten or 55 pence, when it had reached the ‘sell by’ date. Not any more.

Whiff of A Bargain

Is it supermarket strategy to try to get the public to pay more for items marked ‘Reduced to Clear’ because we are so vulnerable to any whiff of a bargain in these lean times of recession?

Do we get less astute in a recession or are the supermarkets just more stingy?

When the bargain shelves in supermarkets were a go-to area to find a real ‘bargain’ you were lucky if anything was left on there. These items were ‘reduced to clear’ but they didn’t need to tell us what they wanted to happen because they were reduced. They just were.

I have seen this in all the major supermarket chains, this reduction in the amount an item is ‘reduced to clear’.