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Price book

I’m seriously considering giving up keeping a price book.

The original idea was to get an idea of what things cost, and what rock bottom prices are, and the sale cycles.

Unfortunately, I haven’t noticed much of a pattern. Maybe it’s a New Zealand thing. Maybe our sales are more sporadic and based on supply and demand. Sometimes items stay on sale for weeks at a time…and it’s rare to see a significant discount on anything.

I should probably sit down one day and rearrange all the products so they line up with each other. At the mo they are entered as shown in order on the receipt. I’ve tried to get around this by colour coding some of our most frequently purchased items, but it’s a headache.

What have I learned from my price book? Not much, except that cheese and milk are getting cheaper, slowly. And that Countdown still hasn’t lowered its dairy prices at all. The difficulty of keeping a price book’s been compounded by the fact that

a) we split our shopping between two supermarkets. One is generally a little cheaper but has less variety.

b) the receipting systems are different. One shows if things are on special, and how much has been saved (ie, the original sticker price, and the amount discounted). Makes it a pain to work out what we actually paid, but shows how much we saved as well. Also, sometimes items don’t scan with a very detailed name and it’s hard to remember what they actually were.

c) meat and veges are hard to account for. They don’t scan with the price per kilo (obviously it’s printed on the packs). But on the receipts, you only see the total price paid. I can remember these off the top of my head sometimes, but not always. And, we often shop for meat and product separately (at the veg shop and the butcher). Keeping track of those, well, is hopeless.

Any thoughts?

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