Hi,

Monday, December 1, 2003, 6:32:51 PM, you wrote:

> Have you ever bought a supermarket's own brand baked beans?

> The supermarket is making a profit on both the sale and manufacture of the
> beans, whereas if you buy a brand name, the profits are split between the
> two companies.

> But does this make it wrong or immoral for the supermarket to do this?

Rather surprisingly, supermarkets don't make a profit on beans (I know
this doesn't affect the point of your reply). The cost of handling
each tin, including scanning and packing at the checkout, is more than
the markup. Competition is so fierce that they can't raise the price
to a profitable level, or decide not to stock them, because nobody
would shop at a supermarket that didn't sell beans, or sold them for a
lot more than their competitors (I exclude places like Fortnum &
Mason here). This is true for a surprising number of other items, too.

-- 
Cheers,
 Bob                            mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]

"Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, 
 because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. 
 We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some 
 things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns the ones we don't 
 know we don't know."

---Donald Rumsfeld (http://www.plainenglish.co.uk/footinmouth.html)

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