Fish. Barrel. Bang.
According to his website, Tim Harford's regular column in the Financial Times, "Dear Economist", is a feature "in which readers' personal problems are answered, tongue-in-cheek, with the latest economic theory." I'm not au fait with the latest in economic theory, but it would appear that Mr. Harford is rather out of date, by some decades, with the facts. His latest in the series, in response to an "Andrew" of London, argues that the rational pricing scheme for a supermarket with regard to perishable food would be the following:
Ideally, then, retailers would adjust their prices to reflect the staleness of the food, with the price declining very slightly over time, before being slashed as the “use by” date approaches. Freshness fetishists like you would gladly pay more, while students, pensioners and computer programmers would scoop up the cheapest products and scrape off the mould.
Products would be allocated efficiently according to preferences for freshness. It can only be a matter of time before the supermarkets catch on.
"Ideally", "only a matter of time", oh dear. While I am not aware of supermarkets in the UK using a sliding scale of price-to-freshness retailing, they certainly do slash the price as the "use by" date approaches on bread and chilled food. If they didn't then malc would be deprived of at least one third of his food... Alas, his website biography doesn't tell us about his background but, according to Wikipedia (yes, I know!):
He earned his MPhil in economics from the University of Oxford in 1998.
Not only was he at Oxford, but given that he's unaware that supermarkets do radically reduce the prices of items before their "use by" date, I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that he must have lead the life of a very pampered student if he was so ignorant of the "REDUCED" shelf in his local supermarket.
For another example of blinkered privilege in British journalism, see the claim of Nick Cohen, a columnist for the Observer, that a "standard young couple" in London earn an annual salary of 100,000 quid between them. This, at least according to the Office of National Statistics, is untrue as the mean annual salary in London for 2006 was £34,819 (the median was £25,114), and an individual income of 50,000 puts both of the supposed "standard young couple" into the top 25% earners in London.
Ideally, then, retailers would adjust their prices to reflect the staleness of the food, with the price declining very slightly over time, before being slashed as the “use by” date approaches. Freshness fetishists like you would gladly pay more, while students, pensioners and computer programmers would scoop up the cheapest products and scrape off the mould.
Products would be allocated efficiently according to preferences for freshness. It can only be a matter of time before the supermarkets catch on.
"Ideally", "only a matter of time", oh dear. While I am not aware of supermarkets in the UK using a sliding scale of price-to-freshness retailing, they certainly do slash the price as the "use by" date approaches on bread and chilled food. If they didn't then malc would be deprived of at least one third of his food... Alas, his website biography doesn't tell us about his background but, according to Wikipedia (yes, I know!):
He earned his MPhil in economics from the University of Oxford in 1998.
Not only was he at Oxford, but given that he's unaware that supermarkets do radically reduce the prices of items before their "use by" date, I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that he must have lead the life of a very pampered student if he was so ignorant of the "REDUCED" shelf in his local supermarket.
For another example of blinkered privilege in British journalism, see the claim of Nick Cohen, a columnist for the Observer, that a "standard young couple" in London earn an annual salary of 100,000 quid between them. This, at least according to the Office of National Statistics, is untrue as the mean annual salary in London for 2006 was £34,819 (the median was £25,114), and an individual income of 50,000 puts both of the supposed "standard young couple" into the top 25% earners in London.