The Last Place You Want To Go
Dixons.co.uk says what we're all thinking...
...though, personally, I'd substitute dixons.co.uk for amazon.co.uk
Original post by Eliza Williams @ creativereview.co.uk
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shopping
I Swear, Christmas Starts Earlier Every Year
via news.sky.com
A full four-and-a-half months before presents are exchanged, London department store Selfridges has put its annual Christmas range on sale.
Customers can rush to buy baubles and stock up on decorations from the Yuletide shop this year earlier than ever before.
The flagship first run of Christmas goods is traditionally sold from the end of August.
The store defended its decision to bring the launch forward, insisting: "We wouldn't (do) it now unless we thought there was a market for it."
Tesco's 'Real Baskets' - Figure Manipulation?
via tesco.com
Asda recently ran an advertising campaign stating that, according to 'independent price checker' mysupermarket.com, Asda have a greater number of cheaper products compared to their rivals. Fair enough, that's easy to understand; when you directly compare products, Asda appear cheaper. That makes a lot of sense to me.
Tesco, of course, are having none of it! What (as far as I can make out) they think is that, although Asda are demonstrably cheaper on the majority of produces they stock when compared with Tesco, these products are NOT products the majority of people buy. So what if Fray Bentos pies are cheaper at Asda if Britain is populated by vegetarians? So Tesco have set about proving that it is they who are cheaper if you look at all the products people buy in an entire weekly shop. This is easily done as we all have to go through the checkout when we buy our shopping, surely Tesco will use this data to in it's calculation?
Err, no.
In fact Tesco decided to only use purchases made by clubcard holders. I'm assuming they did so because it's easier to get data from their clubcard database than from raw checkout data rather than because clubcard holders buy the cheapest products. So we now have data for over 2 million weekly shops, we can analyse these and workout whether Asda is cheaper or more expensive.
Well, in fact, no.
What Tesco decided to do was take a 'random sample' consisting of 10 percent of these weekly shops and work out from these whether the shopper would've been better off going to Asda. They then round back up to 100 percent. Why? Is it really necessary dividing and multiplying by 10 to work out the figure?
A sceptic would suggest that Tesco's method is a way of fudging the results in their favor. I suppose it all depends on how 'random' the selection really is. But I'm positive that a more accurate result could be calculated using ALL of the available data rather than a 10 percent of it.
To be honest, I don't care who's cheaper, I would much rather go to Sainsbury's.
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shopping
statistics
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