Posts Tagged ‘pound store’

£ shops – are they worth it?

Wednesday, June 24th, 2009

There seem to be more and more pound shops and other similar cheap shops appearing on the high street in recent years, and its tempting to either dismiss them as selling tat, or assume that everything they sell is cheap, but what’s the truth really?

I’ve personally found that sometimes these shops appear to offer excellent value for the odd occasionally bought item, a vase, a set of mugs or a cake tin – for example I recently bought 100 wooden pegs in my local pound shop, and 100 pegs for £1 is crazy cheap – I mean that’s 1p per peg! It’s got to be a bargain at that price hasn’t it?  But the items that they sell which I do buy regularly I’ve never really found them to be much cheaper for.  Toothpaste for example – well yes, £1 is not a bad price for a tube of branded toothpaste, but most of the supermarkets sell it at a similar price on a fairly frequent basis, so I normally just buy it from there when it’s on special.  Soft drinks look good when you compare them to the RRP prices– For example I spotted Pepsi Max and Fanta 2 litre bottles in there at £1 each, but when I popped across the road to Farm foods I found that they sell the same 2 litre bottles cheaper – Pepsi Max at 79p and Fanta at 59p, so we’re not talking a couple of pence cheaper either, we’re talking more than 20% and 40% cheaper.  They do however do some excellent deals on coffee and sweets in my local store, so it does seem to be a little bit hit and miss really and the rule seems to be to keep checking other stores to make sure you are getting a bargain.

The other part of the question is whether these sorts of shops are good for the high street, do they make the supermarkets and other shops have to put their prices down, or do they just encourage us to spend money on things because they’re cheap when in fact maybe we don’t need them.  Might I have been better buying fewer pegs for the a slightly higher price somewhere else, but getting decent quality ones that would last longer?  There’s a good possibility that I would be to be honest, but like everyone else, I couldn’t resist the feeling of getting a bargain, so you tell me, do you think I got one? I’m not sure I know.

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