Earlier this week, I was padding around a well known supermarket when I had a thought: “It’s winter. I’ll probably need screenwash.”
But with a head full of shopping list, I ended up chucking the regular haul of groceries in the trolley. Naturally, Murphy’s Law struck the next morning as the low washer fluid lit up on my Volvo V40.
Recalling that the supermarket was punting sensibly priced screenwash for about £3.50 for three or four litres of ready-to-use juice, I went back. Naturally, the shelves were bare, save for half a dozen one-litre bottles of ready mixed – for four quid a pop.
I understand the rules of supply versus demand as much as the next person, but £4 for a litre of own-brand is out of order.
That’s almost three times the price of a litre of diesel. And like diesel, it’s a distress purchase; you need it when you run out. With temperatures dipping to -10deg C, it's not like you can do without it.
And I don’t know how big the average washer bottle is, but it’s got to be a couple of litres. So I suspect, faced with spending £8 to fill a bottle, cash-strapped motorists might not bother. And that's extremely dangerous.
What other motoring-related rip-offs can you think of?
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Fill up at the fuel station
At various Tesco's up here you can pay £1 and get air and pre-mixed screenwash on tap. Seems to be reasonable concentration too as no freezing issues in the -12'C to date. Seems like a good deal to me, and it encourages me to check my tyre pressures more often.
I'd like to switch my headlight washers off - useless feature that uses vast quantities of screenwash, although the F10 does stop washing the headlights when the level gets low - must be a dual chamber washer bottle.
Other rip offs for cars? Fuel of course!
Random irritation - basic commodity prices i.e. the things we need to have basic living requirements are all controlled by free markets and subject to financial traders inflating prices i.e. food (wheat, corn, etc), heating fuel, even water in some areas (via metering). A bit away from screenwash I know, but something is far wrong with the world when basics are subect to free market forces.
rip off
What is not a rip off in the UK though? I purchased a Nokia for 30% on a german website compared to amazon uk.
Also clothing I was purchasing items the other day and you can pretty much swap the pound sign for the dollar on levis and other websites.
Then there is the VW Polo, £625 extra for curtain airbags while the same option on a Fabia is £250, VW operate like this with most of their safety options which happen to be standard on many other manufacturers (Fiesta/Clio et cetera).
230SL wrote:What is not a
as with supermarkets, Amazon prices are quite often the most expensive because they know 90% of people blindly do 90% of their online shopping with them and are stupid enough to assume they're always getting the best deal. Example: the pricing of their Nexus 7, which since launch has been 5-10% more than Google's recommended retail price.
Like most stuff, jeans attract VAT at 20%. If you take a $49.95 pair of jean, by the time you've done your currency conversion and added the VAT then yes you're looking at pretty much £40. But that's not really indicative of anything except we get taxed for the stuff the average American has to pay for out of disposal income - and pay through the nose for.
And before we get into that, show me a quality of living survey where an American city makes even the top 20.
Just got some screenwash from tescos.....
And it smells like horse piss should I be worried ?