How was the tour of the Imperial Sugar Plant, by the way? I drove by it and thought it looked interesting, although my definition of interesting is different than most. One of the curses of wanting to know how everything works (mechanical engineer) or at least confirm that it works like I think it might.
I assume you mean “whoosh.”
So this:
[QUOTE=Originally Posted by PunditLisa ]
Airlines base their prices on average price of jet fuel multiplied by the linear mileage, divided by average passenger load. They multiply that by pi to get the first class fare. At -65 days, they discount that price by 20%. At -64 days, they take the average discount, multiply it by the inverse quadratic equation, divide it by the ground temperature outside, and then add on $5.00 just for the hell of it.
[/QUOTE]
…ain’t so? I have no idea.
Dealers - antique dealers, art dealers, rare book dealers, etc. - typically structure their pricing to take into account Good Customer (~10%) and Dealer (~20%) discounts - along with having to cover overhead/fixed costs, that is why they look to buy collectible stuff from scouts who found something at a garage sale and are trying to flip for a profit at ~50% of retail at best…
Not retail, but I used to work for a company where some products were sold via different sales channels, under different brand names and for different prices. In one extreme case, a product had three different channels and names and the most expensive one went for 2 figures more than the cheapest version - since both the middle and super-expensive versions had the same use (cosmetics), you know which brand did the factory workers and their wives buy in turn…
I must respectfully disagree with this. My business has over 20 printers going and often times the store brand is terrible. Not because of the ink but because of the packaging. It gets clogs and stops working while the name brand product seems to be of better quality. I think it depends on who makes the packaging more than who makes the ink.
Do any antique dealers use the method outlined in the Lovejoy mystery novels? The method is to price items as a % of either a month or year’s worth of minimum wage. The idea was that items could remain in the shop for years and inflation could do wicked things to in un-updated price tag. Also, it made the code harder for customers to crack.
But the murders were fiction, so the price tags could have been, too.
Well, this was probably 1983 or so, and the plant’s since shut down, but it was pretty cool.
Basically what they did is get raw sugar off of rail cars (which are filled at the port from break-bulk ships), store it in a gigantic mountain in a warehouse for a while, then dissolve it in water, skim off the crap/let it settle out.
Then they crystallize the sucrose in the solution by adding tiny starter crystals. After some period of time, they then centrifuge the water and molasses off the crystals, which depending on the stage of centrifuging, is either added back to the crystallization, or drawn off and concentrated as molasses.
The crystals then get redissolved, passed through charcoal to purify it and remove color and flavor, recrystallized, dried and packaged.
Brown sugar’s made by putting a portion of the molasses back onto the white sugar.
Here’s a more detailed (and modern) description:
The markup on new furniture is completely insane. That is all I got.
The markup on new clothes is even more insanely high.
But there is a good reason for this (for both clothes & furniture).
You have somewhat less than 100 days to sell all the seasonal clothes (like Fall clothes) you ordered. After that, the next season is here, and you need to get those Fall ones off the floor because you need that space for the Winter ones. And you can’t put them in storage and bring them out next Fall – they will be out of style by then (plus most stores can’t afford to have money tied up in inventory that’s in storage). So you have to sell it within 100 days. Thus it starts out with a high markup, so the first ones sold cover the loss from the last ones that don’t sell. And that gives you room for markdowns, so even the half-off or 2/3rds off sales still make a profit or at least break even.
The same applies to a lot of furniture, except that you have more time to sell it – 6 months to a year before it’s out of style.
Note that this only applies to ‘stylish’ items; other items like blue jeans, work clothes, mens white dress shirts, etc. stay in style forever, so they stay in stock on the sales floor forever, thus they are not marked up nearly as much. Probably some utility furniture items are similar (kitchen table & chairs, maybe?).
I used to work for a company that made nutritional supplements. We would also make the exact same product and package it under our brand name and the “generic” brand name for several of the major retailers around the country. It was all the same stuff.
There are only two grades of gasoline: 87 and 92 octane. If a gas station sells a mid-grade (usually 89) it’s a blend of the other two.
I am not familiar with that approach, but it is certainly possible…there is definitely a need to match your pricing and sales potential with your ability to cover your costs…
Gas station schemes I’ve seen or heard about:
Tell the customer the oil is a bit low when it’s not. Sell the oil for cash without ringing it up and pretend to pour it in the engine. Pocket the cash.
Another scheme was back when we had the old mechanical credit card crunching machine at a self-service station, working only one employee per shift.
The employee would make a second sales slip and crunch the customer’s credit card while the customer pumps gas. When the customer comes in to pay after pumping gas, crunch the actual normal sales slip for the correct amount and put it in the stack of credit card slips for the shift.
A while after the customer leaves, fill out the second sales slip for some similar amount as the first, copy the signature from the first sales slip, pocket that amount of cash from the till, and add the second sales slip to the credit card sales stack. At the end of your shift, your cash and credit card sales will each be off, but by the same amount, so no big deal.
Then, just hope the customer doesn’t read the credit card bill too closely and question two gas card transactions on the same day.
Also, hope this doesn’t happen …
Well, the boss was going through the cc slips for the shift, which was normal. By sheer accident, he did notice multiple transactions during the same shift by more than one customer.
The boss told me about it but didn’t tell the other employee who had the repeat business during her shift. We agreed that it would be rare that one customer returned to the station for a second transaction in the same day, and it would be very rare that more than one customer returned to the station for a second transaction in the same day, let alone during the same shift.
He then quietly went through the credit card sales slips very carefully each day afterward. During the boss’s shift and during my shift, there were no repeat credit card customers. During the other employee’s shift, he found two or three repeat credit card customers every day.
Result: prison.
Oh … IIRC, they eventually figured out the total embezzlement turned out to be to the tune of $10k-$15k over the course of that employee’s tenure.
And it’s actually the same gas, too.
Here in Minnesota, all gas sold in the state comes here through 1 of 3 pipelines. All the different brands get their gas from the same pipelines. They do have different sets of additives they add to the tank of gas, which might change it some, but it starts out the same.
I sell 87, 89, and 91. Not 92. 89 is a 50/50 blend.
Joe
This isn’t exactly a store secret, but it’ll save you money. Cook’s Illustrated magazine tested a rumor that button mushrooms that have started to go brown actually taste better. It’s true! The bedraggled mushrooms with the manager’s special tags are much cheaper, and they taste better.
Ten percent ethanol is 89 - which one would it be added to?
Well CAR gasoline. There is 100LL aviation gas
Brian
In one restraunt where I worked as a teen, our manager instructed us to not ring up items like coffee or soft drinks if that was the only thing on the ticket (this was back in the olden days when we wrote out our tickets by hand without entering them into a computer). When the drawer was changed at the end of the shift, the soft drink / coffee money went into the manager’s pocket and the tickets in the trash.
A number of employees who worked the register pretty much did the same thing on the front end, pocketing the .30 for a cup of coffee or .50 for a coke and throwing away the ticket. Sort of scamming the scammer.
I know Aldi in the US is controlled by “Aldi North” and Trader Joe’s is controlled by “Aldi South”, or vice versa – different companies, but still related. Still, I’m wondering if there’s any Aldi items that are exactly the same as what would be found on the shelves at Trader Joe’s under a different name. Aldi’s Orange Chicken (Fusia) is definitely inferior to Trader Joe’s Orange Chicken. Aldi pita chips (Clancy’s) seem the same as TJ’s, which are supposedly the same as Stacy’s. Since TJ’s won’t be coming to upstate New York, but Aldi is everywhere here, it’ll be nice to know what hidden TJ items are on the shelves.