miner1000 wrote:AleisterCrowley wrote:In the wonderful world of mobile phones, we're seeing 'unprecedented' levels of voice traffic. Not so much increase in data traffic. We are in a 'work from home' regime now, but obviously not possible for NMC/data centre staff, or shop staff.
Actually, where I live (Australia) we are seeing big increases in both voice and data traffic. So I would (if I were buying) buy Supermarkets (IC recommends Tesco and Morrison) and good digital Data and Voice providers such as Vodafone (which by the way, is no longer available for a quid).
I think Tesco is going to do particularly well.
I couldn't help notice after they said they would 'reduce lines' to speed up getting stock, they appear to have got rid of the budget ranges and replaced with premium.
My local Tesco's normally has pretty large boxes of own brand cornflakes for only 75p (actually pretty good and I'm normally well stocked up normally on them, and they're normally half the price of the Morrison's equivalent own brand size last time I checked prior to the crisis)..
.. went there last night, and no shelf space there for those own brand any more at all... all replaced by stacks and stacks of branded Kellogs cornflakes filling the area at around £2.40 for a similar size box. You want cornflakes, you're gonna have to pay!
That said, they seemed largely untouched (by me included!)... maybe it'll backfire on them...
I also feel their 'rationing' is probably more of a sales scam than anything helpful.
I mean limiting _everything_ to max 3 per customer meant I couldn't even do my normal shop for 1 person, let alone buy a little extra to allow me to reduce my number of shops.
If anything, ensuring people can't stock up is potentially going to *increase* supermarket visits, just at a time they *should* be helping people *reduce* the need to shop so often. God knows how a family of 4 with hungry kids would get on … I mean, they'll probably need to be making a supermarket visit every day thanks to the 3 item limit!!
But from the shops point of view, each time you go, the majority of people always buy more (other) stuff while they're there to make the journey worth while. So limiting maximum numbers of individual items is going to ensure people make more trips, which then equals more sales of the extras. Or push people into buying neighbouring items that will probably be more expensive, etc.
Their abolition of multi-buy offers - of course because they wouldn't want to encourage bulk buying, I mean, that could mean shoppers needing to shop less often, and we don't want that do we, even though there's allegedly no supply problems! - but it also means higher margins for the supermarket.
Removing multibuy and other offer prices is a good way of putting up prices without being seen to raise prices.
Add it all together - low margin lines scrapped + item quantity limits ensuring the need for more supermarket trips (or purchase of other likely more expensive items) + reduction / elimination of offers, and I think Tesco are going to do pretty nicely (imv for the wrong reasons, but hey)... they just have to watch how they manage their PR.
(I notice amazon seems to be doing similar - many of the things on my wishlist that I just monitor as 'maybe' purchases - have either completely lost any reductions, or the reductions aren't as low as they were prior to the crisis … except for emergency, I doubt I'll be buying anything from amazon until things start to get back to normal)
