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The truths they don't want you to read....

Saturday, June 12, 2010

Minimum alcohol pricing - how it works

And who can argue with....
Tesco chief executive Sir Terry Leahy said the retailer would now "support any future discussions on a minimum price for alcohol"
Apropos nothing in particular, can you guess which supermarket was today running a "World Cup Special" offer on beer; with two cases (of 10 cans each) for £16 or 3 for £20?

Yes, 67p gets you a can of full strength beer or lager, to help you get in the right mood (sic) for supporting which ever team rocks your boat.

This quadrennial event, it looks like I am supporting Ireland, as the Guinness was also on special offer.

Next to me at the checking, two lads were taking advantage of the special offer. Not once, nor twice, but at least thrice with 90 cans of beer/lager/cider for £60.

And you wonder why pubs are in trouble and excessive boozing occurs.....

All that minimum pricing will do is increase the margin that supermarkets make, leaving them still cheaper than pubs, but without the overhead. And generating no cash for the Government to work on providing alternatives.

8 comments:

Fiscal Responsibility said...

Great, so your arguing for Holyrood to have control over alcohol duty?

Do labour have any positive policies other than banning caffeine for neds?

Anonymous said...

What makes it worse Angus was that each case has 15 cans not 10 so if you care to revise your figures its 45 cans for £20 or +/- 50p a go!!!

Anonymous said...

The Guinness was in cases of 10. Presumably the lager etc was in different sizes. Even still, pricing like this is going to kill the local drinking establishments. They probably can't buy it in that cheap!

Anonymous said...

There are some pubs here who buy their stock in the supermarkets. What's happening now is that people are staying in drinking the cheap supermarket beer then going into town for the last couple of hours of the night.

Anonymous said...

If we can have the dearest petrol and nobody can fight it legally then why cant we have the dearest booze??????

Anonymous said...

Not sure why people think that increasing alcohol prices will help reduce substance abuse. There are a lot more expensive highs than booze and yet people always have the cash to pay. Its just another red herring.

Anonymous said...

Legalise cannabis - pot heads are much easier to handle than drunks.

Anonymous said...

If the price of drink is artificially pushed up all that happens is that folks start to make their own. The beeb often tell us of the wonderful way the Scandinavians dealt with this, however the only fool who buys commercial drink anywhere in Scandinavia is either a tourist or a millionaire.

Many in the far North distil their own, after all its not rocket science and contrary to Government spin you wont go blind. As long as the price of sugar stays reasonable they cannot go wrong. Now if the Government wants to let that genie out of the bottle........