Uk society – The price of complacent consumerism

Having spent the last week purchasing a number of things, it has brought forward the issue of price discrepancy in the UK. Now classically the UK has always had the 'high street price' for everything, as opposed to internet / second hand / stolen car boot stereotype - thing is this stereotype is still there, but there are other even nastier price discrepancies. I guess the one I experienced last week (but fortunately didn’t pay) was the price for not doing ones research:

1.  Few tools at the LBS (local bike shop) - internet price £19 + 9 - upon rocking up at the till £23 + 11 - they claim that they have separate 'internet' and 'bricks and mortar' prices in order to pay overheads. Fair play, but they also offer a price-matching service - which essentially means the onus is on the customer to highlight this discrepancy to them.
2. 10 mins later, a few bits of camping gear at Decathlon - 3 items, all heavily discounted. The guy rings it up at retail - and was not too happy when i told him what it was all discounted, and about 40% cheaper. And its not the first time this has happened at Decathlon for me!
3. A few days later i was getting quotes for a car service - I was quoted £185 by the manufacturer, and found my local dealer wanted to charge £320, and was surprised when i told them they were dreaming

So the lesson from those 3 above -always check the market / listed value of items when doing anything involving spending your own cash in the UK. Those are a few personal examples, but how far does the price discrepancy thing go in the UK?

Cafe's seem to love charging separate prices for eat-in and take-away items – siilar to the bike shop example. This is only of the order of 10%, so their reasoning of paying for overheads is perhaps a little weak. The only other i can think of is perhaps limited space, and paying for the luxury - although places that are not limited by it still have the split pricing - perhaps this is where it originated, then it became culturally accepted and here we are. Cafe's also love to discriminate with pricing when it comes to location. The same chain cafe will charge nearly twice the price at a train station in the UK as it would elsewhere - but then again the UK does have a major obsession with convenience (and associated charges).

Purchasing a car of late, the classic eat-in / take out style discrepancy rasied it's head again - I visited several cars that were £500-1000 cheaper on the net as they were on the lot. These were not expensive cars either - at £3-5 k, that discrepancy makes up a fair saving. Thing was, since i had come in as an internet customer, most of them were happy to disclose the 'actual' selling prices of the other cars on the lot, as opposed to the listed price. It must be an idiot who pays list price at these places. Same thing happened when i was looking at cameras – a Mamiya 7 with lens was advertised at £600-800 depending on condition. I walked in and casually asked about one, and was told that i would be £1400 for any in stock. Needless to say nicholas camera is a massive rip-off.

Naturally with material goods showing such a massive financial disparity, the same could be assumed for financial products - and you would be right. I think this is perhaps one of the few facets of the market that consumers here have clued up to - and now big business is on the bandwagon with a mass influx of comparison websites - these things are absolutely insidious, and are closely related to rubish financial products / ad campaigns i have written about on here before. One of the greatest ironies here is that the general British population seems chuffed that they can save £10 on their car insurance through a comparison website – yet be bled dry by shifty retailers on material purchase - all because they have not done their research.

I have written in the past that the Australian economy has suffered from being closed to competition - but i now am convinced that the British market is suffering the opposite problem - the market is flooded, and it takes a lot of consumer awareness to pay the appropriate price here. Now i find myself yearning for a regulated market like France, Switzerland or Germany. It's a funny sensation in these countries, i've even bought vanilla slice for 7.50 CHF and not felt ripped off - i'd probably feel robbed if i paid that in the UK - but that’s the joys of a 'free' economy. 

As a postscript, I picked my car up from it's service yesterday, where i was told the clutch pedal needed replacing for  £150 (the source of the problem is actually a 50p bushing), and that the cambelt would need changing (£360), despite being only 95k miles into it's 144k mile service life. There were a few more sus charges i avoided, but hey I work in the Automotive design industry - what would the average punter do?

Uk Society - Scrap value

It would seem in the consumer world in the UK at present everything is gifted with an ultimate value - scrap value. In ordinary times perhaps this would not be significant, however at present it’s a fortune.  

One poignant example is that of cars – when a car reaches a certain age it would seem that the average English person would rather weigh up a vehicles value in pure scrap terms – if the scrap price is higher than the cost of repair or selling the car, you can bet that they will be weighing it in ASAP for scrap, and if not the value they are after? Simply an improvement on what the scrap man was offering. You could say i was somewhat snookered into this when my trusty 106 quit on me with a dropped rod (and a small fire) a few months back, but i digress. 

 

While the automotive sector is the main focus of scrapping, it is not just limited to that though. Gold is also high on the scrap list – with gold shops aplenty offering to buy items on weight. I suspect this however is a sign of the times along with pay-day loans more than anything though!

Not only is scrap limited to high value or high volume metals. The other day i had the cassette changed on my road bike at a shop – the guy was most excited that he would not only receive proceeds for fixing my bike, but also the proceeds for cashing the cassette in for it’s scrap value.

It would then seem that the scrap man can be seen as ridding the world of all its nasty leftover evils. Not so it would seem when you consider what else seems to get thrown through the UK’s scrap recycling system. All manner of public amenities seem to be stolen and put through it, including manhole covers and railway cables. The latter first came to my attention with a poster while on the train one morning. 

So the scrap man is the omnipresent remover of all evil, and the great market yardstick in the UK, but how would this place survive without him? The outer Hebridies in Northern Scotland provide a clue to this – there all manner of things are left to rot in fields after they have outlived their economic lives. I suspect though in such a cut throat economy that the cost of collection has traditionaly outweighed  the value of these items. Yes, sadly the mass obsession with scrap is an economic one, and a reflection on the countries deep-rooted capitalism and class structure, rather than one on environmentalism, with the current interest due to high scrap value and a dead economy. If I was a budding scrap  enthusiast,  I’d be setting up business in the outer Hebs.