The 'Rip Off Britain' thread

[themeone]

Drinks in pubs. It's insane to be paying best part of (or even all of) a tenner for a pint.

 

[Baxenden Bank]

I've never seen any inflated prices like that on my toothpaste, although I do read a lot about it happening this forum.

Where exactly are these high prices being charged? The usual price on the one I use, which is a main brand ( MacLeans ) is £1.20 a tube - a normal sized large tube, that is.

The main supermarkets, for anything other than a basic flouride toothpaste.

That is, the ones which purportedly stengthen, whiten, harden enamel, replace enamel, reduce sensitivity etc. Upto £80 per litre compared to Tesco Essentials Cavity Protection at £4.50 per litre and MacLeans Freshmint at £13 per litre. Then again comparing that Tesco with Macleans shows a very large price difference.

== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: 9 May 2026 ==

Drinks in pubs. It's insane to be paying best part of (or even all of) a tenner for a pint.

It's the tax.

When real ale was around £3 per pint (in Stoke-on-Trent pubs generally, not cheapo ones) it was clearly advertised as selling to the pub at £1 per pint. The rest was running costs, tax and profit. Discovered as we went to the beer festival immediately after the trade session and some flyers were left lying around.

 

[Peter Mugridge]

The main supermarkets, for anything other than a basic flouride toothpaste.

That is, the ones which purportedly stengthen, whiten, harden enamel, replace enamel, reduce sensitivity etc. Upto £80 per litre compared to Tesco Essentials Cavity Protection at £4.50 per litre and MacLeans Freshmint at £13 per litre. Then again comparing that Tesco with Macleans shows a very large price difference.

It's Tesco where I'm buying the MacLeans...

 

[Ted633]

Drinks in pubs. It's insane to be paying best part of (or even all of) a tenner for a pint.

My local here in South Surrey, I can nearly get three pints for a tenner! Almost 4 if I go to the Wetherspoons. (And almost 5 if I decide to be really dirty and have a Bud Light!)

 

[JamesT]

Council car park charges.
Not only are they too expensive, but the same councils also prohibit on street parking even when this would not impede traffic flow, thus effectively forcing drivers to use pay and display car parks. The knock on effect of this is fewer shop customers in an already depressed high street. An example of this is Marine Drive, East Wittering. There are parking restrictions on this road, and on many others in seaside towns, but they only apply during the summer (April to September) which quite conveniently is when the holiday makers turn up, and the council car park on Marine Drive is even more expensive to use than some of the car parks in Chichester.

Studies have been done that find shoppers who arrive other than by car spend more in shops and traders overestimate the numbers of people who visit by car.
Making the environment more pleasant for them (I.e. not a sea of parked cars or a constant stream of traffic) may well be a net positive even if you personally dislike it.

 

[simonw]

The phrase 'Rip Off Britain' has been going for ages.

This thread is to draw attention to things you think are an absolute rip off

Define rip-off.
To me it's something that is sold at a price that is far higher than its cost due to exploitation of market imperfections. Imho Few things in this country fall into that definition.

 

[Harpo]

It's the tax.

It’s not tax inflating beer prices. When a Greene King beer is £5.90 in one of their own pubs in their own back yard (East Anglia) but around £2 in every Spoons for hundreds of miles, tax is clearly not the answer.

 

[Mcr Warrior]

It’s not tax inflating beer prices.

What are we talking about on a ~£6.00 pint? Maybe 50p alcohol duty and then £1.00 V.A.T.?

 

[SuspectUsual]

What are we talking about on a ~£6.00 pint? Maybe 50p alcohol duty and then £1.00 V.A.T.?

Pretty much that

As you say a £6 pint would be £1 VAT

Duty on almost all beer (3.5% to 8.5% strength anyway) is £21.78 per litre of alcohol, so if we take the awful Sharp's Doom Bar, at 4%, which seems somehow to be the best selling draft bitter in the UK, we get:

568.281/1000 litres of drink x 4% = 0.02273 litres of alcohol, x £21.78 = 49.5p of alcohol duty

 

[fwsmVor]

My taxes subsidising car parking. A plot of land the size of a parking space goes on the open market for about £50-100/month rent, so why should free on-street parking exist? It just subsidises people storing their private property in the public domain: private property that makes the public domain worse by existing, whether it be static (urban heat island effect, blocking half the **** pavement, necessitating twice the width of tarmac than otherwise) or moving (pollution, congestion, noise). If you buy a car without a driveway to store it on you might as well have bought a sofa and just plonked it in the road.

 

[johntea]

Shopping at Sainsbury's yesterday over half my shop was with Nectar card 'savings' - if I didn't use a Nectar card for example they would have happily charged me £2.45 rather than £1 for one product (Tesco do the same with Clubcard prices)

I can understand why they do it (to collect lots and lots of customer shopping habit data!) and it isn't a huge exercise to sign up for such a loyalty card but I do wonder about how much profit they're making from the people that don't realize/choose to sign up for them!

 

[SuspectUsual]

Shopping at Sainsbury's yesterday over half my shop was with Nectar card 'savings' - if I didn't use a Nectar card for example they would have happily charged me £2.45 rather than £1 for one product (Tesco do the same with Clubcard prices)

I can understand why they do it (to collect lots and lots of customer shopping habit data!) and it isn't a huge exercise to sign up for such a loyalty card but I do wonder about how much profit they're making from the people that don't realize/choose to sign up for them!

The thing I can’t get my head round is whether this data is actually particularly valuable, because the size of the “discounts” surely massively distort the customer’s true buying intentions?

 

[D365]

If you buy a car without a driveway to store it on you might as well have bought a sofa and just plonked it in the road.

Perhaps worth a thread of its own, but I'm not sure what you are getting at with your post. I understand the sentiment of this particular sentence, but it reads like a blanket statement against the millions of residential properties (terrace, townhouse or otherwise) whose only provision for parking is on-street.

 

[Farigiraf]

Perhaps worth a thread of its own, but I'm not sure what you are getting at with your post. I understand the sentiment of this particular sentence, but it reads like a blanket statement against the millions of residential properties (terrace, townhouse or otherwise) whose only provision for parking is on-street.

In edge-of-town suburbs with one bus an hour where the only parking provision is on-street, I'd understand why not owning a car is still a bad idea.
But I think the poster (whose location is London/Berlin, both places with excellent transport) was referring to places where you can easily get around with just a bike and an oyster card (or equivalent). In these cities, purchasing and maintaining a car is most often an unnecessary strain on road space and your finances.

 

[dgl]

The thing I can’t get my head round is whether this data is actually particularly valuable, because the size of the “discounts” surely massively distort the customer’s true buying intentions?

I know when they did the original trial of the Tesco Clubcard one of the Tesco bosses remarked that the company doing it knew more about their customers in six months than he did with his years of experience, supposedly the data is very valuable, even just to make sure each store is selling the right things for the clientele it gets.

 

[Peter Mugridge]

I know when they did the original trial of the Tesco Clubcard one of the Tesco bosses remarked that the company doing it knew more about their customers in six months than he did with his years of experience, supposedly the data is very valuable, even just to make sure each store is selling the right things for the clientele it gets.

What a pity, then, that they are often out of stock on some of the items I buy most regularly, and they never seem to think to ask why I'm not buying some things that I was previously buying a lot of ( spoiler for Tesco bosses: you stopped selling them but your rivals didn't, so guess what I'm doing...?! )

 

[Dave61]

Perhaps you could start the discussion off with a few things that you think are an absolute rip-off.

It's really annoying when people start "empty" threads.

It might be easier to say what "is not" a rip-off

 

[SuspectUsual]

I know when they did the original trial of the Tesco Clubcard one of the Tesco bosses remarked that the company doing it knew more about their customers in six months than he did with his years of experience, supposedly the data is very valuable, even just to make sure each store is selling the right things for the clientele it gets.

Yes, but it was a purer dataset they created because there were only “normal” promotions and you could assume all customers - with or without a clubcard - were behaving in a similar way

 

[Dave61]

Overall I think it is how you see things, there are some obvious ones that have been mentioned such as drop off at airports, leaseholds (I was warned off them back in the 1990's) but by and large I feel that companies collude together so that whilst you make think sometimes that you are getting a bargan/better deal , in fact with genuine compitition there would be even lower prices on offer.

So most of the time you shop around and find....not a lot of difference, meanwhile the mobile phone, internet, sky/virgin subscriptions got up every year - usually by inflation + a % (and they got around trying to ban that one), petrol/diesel shoot up real fast...and come down like slow like a feather. Its just lots of little things

 

[fwsmVor]

Perhaps worth a thread of its own, but I'm not sure what you are getting at with your post. I understand the sentiment of this particular sentence, but it reads like a blanket statement against the millions of residential properties (terrace, townhouse or otherwise) whose only provision for parking is on-street.

If you don't have parking, don't get a car. Japan manages. Perhaps bus provision would improve once people have to start paying for their little rectangle of public road.

 

[Dave61]

If you don't have parking, don't get a car. Japan manages. Perhaps bus provision would improve once people have to start paying for their little rectangle of public road.

Good luck getting elected with that as a mandate!

Public transport is not the answer to everything, before I retired I worked out that I *could* have used a bus/train but would have had to catch the first bus and then the last train/bus home - and that assumes that everything worked perfectly. It would have been a miserable existance.

 

[Sonic1234]

WHSmith

Leasehold service charges

Is a huge problem. Often said the solution to housing shortages is to build flats or increase density, but people don't want to be trapped with huge service charges. The "starter" flats sell to people who it's their only way to buy a property, but the expensive flats get left - those who can buy a freehold house do in general.

 

[contrex]

The thing I can’t get my head round is whether this data is actually particularly valuable, because the size of the “discounts” surely massively distort the customer’s true buying intentions?

I have loyalty cards that can provide discounts, and while they might influence a choice, e.g. one cheese over another, I tend not to buy things just because they are discounted (in fact I have a list and rarely deviate from it).

 

[The exile]

I have loyalty cards that can provide discounts, and while they might influence a choice, e.g. one cheese over another, I tend not to buy things just because they are discounted (in fact I have a list and rarely deviate from it).

Indeed - one of the things that always amuses me about the “data” that these schemes harvest (or the way it is used) is how “dumb” it is - taking no account of logic. What’s the point (no pun intended) of offering a saving / discount on something like chilli powder / flakes one week on the strength that I bought some the week before? With something like that, buying some one week is a good indicator that you won’t be in the market for any the next.

 

[SuspectUsual]

I have loyalty cards that can provide discounts, and while they might influence a choice, e.g. one cheese over another, I tend not to buy things just because they are discounted (in fact I have a list and rarely deviate from it).

Absolutely. It moves demand rather than creating it

 

[Broucek]

Absolutely. It moves demand rather than creating it

Which can be helpful. If Tesco has too much Cathedral City Cheese in its warehouse and not enough own brand cheddar, it makes sense to target discounts on the Cathedral City inventory

== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: 12 May 2026 ==

Indeed - one of the things that always amuses me about the “data” that these schemes harvest (or the way it is used) is how “dumb” it is - taking no account of logic. What’s the point (no pun intended) of offering a saving / discount on something like chilli powder / flakes one week on the strength that I bought some the week before? With something like that, buying some one week is a good indicator that you won’t be in the market for any the next.

Yes, I bought a watch online last year. I then immediately had loads of watch adverts....

 

[SuspectUsual]

Which can be helpful. If Tesco has too much Cathedral City Cheese in its warehouse and not enough own brand cheddar, it makes sense to target discounts on the Cathedral City inventory

Tesco don’t hold stock of fresh products in their warehouses. None of the big supermarkets do.

And the Clubcard promos are all pre-planned and scheduled because they need to amend their supplier forecasts up (promo products) and down (impacted products)

 

[Broucek]

Tesco don’t hold stock of fresh products in their warehouses. None of the big supermarkets do.

And the Clubcard promos are all pre-planned and scheduled because they need to amend their supplier forecasts up (promo products) and down (impacted products)

Thanks - my post was pure guesswork and perhaps I should have paused for thought before posting....

 

[Howardh]

Not sure if it's "rip-off" territory, but having to continually subscribe to things, whether it be Sky, Netflix, computer software, stuff in new cars etc, rather than an one-off payment then you "own" it, as you used to when buying DVD's, computer software etc and the difficulty of unsubscribing to many such things.

 

[sor]

Not sure if it's "rip-off" territory, but having to continually subscribe to things, whether it be Sky, Netflix, computer software, stuff in new cars etc, rather than an one-off payment then you "own" it, as you used to when buying DVD's, computer software etc and the difficulty of unsubscribing to many such things.

At least Sky and Netflix provide some continuing value in the form of an ever changing programme library. "Software as a Service" is much more irritating, especially when the supplier decides that's the only way they want you to buy the product (either by making the cost of a perpetual licence too expensive, or withdrawing it entirely).

The BMW heated seats things was mindblowingly insane though. You're already paying for the fuel to carry the extra hardware around but you can't ever use it without paying even more...?