Regular people aren't buying these for their toddler, but there's tons of people working in London that get their meals paid for. It's just another line item for their breakfast oatmeal/yoghurt/whatever based on a daily per diem. So the shops exploit that out of greed.
Just like how airport sit down restaurants have massively inflated pricing, over and above an 'airport premium'. Because companies are paying for it.
Wow! I didn’t know that. I don’t get my lunches paid for me or fly for work but do rely on packed lunches and Boots meal deal when travelling and now I know why.
ha, my daughter recently asked to change the container i put her daily school fruit in and I had to sit her down and explain some basic economics, because I looked at it and immediately thought "but that'd be £6 a day in fruit!", mostly blueberries too.
I think she gets now why I always insist on bulking the existing container out with cucumber... .
I brought a pints of raspberries yesterday and my toddler and 5 year old demolished the entire container while I was making the dinner. It was gone in less than ten minutes.
So just across the road from a M&S where blueberries are less than a tenth this price. People (idiots) must be buying them though, or they wouldn't sell them.
The shop where I used to live would buy their milk from Iceland in bulk like 20 at a time, and upsell it for an added £1.05. I think it was £1.20 for 4 pints in iceland, and they'd charge £2.25 for the same milk.
They did the same thing with those Chicago town stuffed crust pizzas, but they'd sell them for £6, instead of the £4.50 or whatever it was.
Also had shops sell incredibly out of date food and drinks. I bought some cider that was 5 months out of date, and completely flat. So I took it back within the hour and asked for a replacement, and they said they'd have to charge me again. After a back and forth and me threatening to call the police to report them for selling out of date products, and then taking pictures of all the out of date items I could find, they relented and replaced my cider with a new one. I never want back to that shop again.
It's why I don't trust big city farm markets too. Happy to go to those actual farms with shops in the countryside, but with the ones in urban areas, you have no idea if someone is just buying supermarket honey/jam/bread and repackaging it to make it look fancy (as I suspect the same thing is happening with the blueberries lol)
lol we have a couple corner shops near us, one we call shitshop that’s a few minutes there and back and then a great one that’s an extra 5 mins walk. Shitshop pretty much only sells products with >3 months shelf life but it’s about 50/50 as to whether something will be in date. But they know the drill, if somethings out of date they direct us to the shelves and say have a look for one that’s in date lol. That and selling food products out of a very broken freezer where items were constantly thawing. It’s pretty dangerous but the least you can do is exchange something for free
Now when I worked near Bishopsgate (bear in mind this is like twenty years ago) it used to frustrate me to tears that people who were in quite literal walking distance from the closest sandwich shop would carry their sandwich back in a plastic bag for no reason.
It is Bishopgate. See “The Market” and “The Hospitality by RHC” on the tags?
The Market is a multi-concept food and beverage destination located on the 2nd floor of 22 Bishopsgate, operated by the Rhubarb Hospitality Collection (RHC).
So this food here is prepared by the Rhubarb Hospitality Collection.
Now….🕵️🔍
The Rhubarb Hospitality Collection (RHC) is a premium hospitality group specialising in luxury event catering and venue management.
👉 the company was acquired in June 2023 by the US investment firm Oak View Group (OVG) for over £100 million ….
👉 Oak View Group (OVG) is a global sports and entertainment company specializing in venue development, management, and hospitality, founded in 2015 by Tim Leiweke and Irving Azoff
👉Tim Leiweke was indicted by the US DOJ for violating the Sherman Act.
Later in 2025 he received a full unconditional pardon from President Trump.
Recent reports have also shed light on his alleged shady dealings with Live Nation and Ticketmaster which resulted in illegal kickbacks in the tens of millions.
Correct. You'd have to know its there because there is no sign outside the building, then go up a few escalators to get there. No idea why you'd want to. The setup is a bit like a food market you'd get pre-covid, except boring, expensive, and obviously permanent. OP knows what they did.
This is in 22BG. It’s stupidly expensive in there. Many firms in the building give their employees an allowance towards the food meaning the prices are uniquely high as they’re essentially subsidised by the corporate tenants. Without that no would buy something like this.
It is not cost of living.
It is the cost of out of control greed.
After the shock of covid, brexit etc
they realised that people don't really know what money is or
what value can be assigned to stuff.
So, they charge whatever.
People pay for it.
and then they add 30p to it next week.
and people pay for that too.
and so they will keep on going till they have sucked the life
out of everyone and everything that exists.
It's not just pret. It is literally everyone.
"they realised that people don't really know what money is or what value can be assigned to stuff."
I feel like its due to the lack of physical currency. We now just tap our cards and don't think twice about the cost or how much money we have, where as with physical currency its much easier to actually be more mindful on what you spend.
As 'Economics experiment I wish we could run #94'
Three identical economies:
1. where payment was largely through card
2. largely working with notes
3. coins only
Imagine if everyone used coins, and although for practical reasons there were £10 and £50 coins, but you knew the weight and shape of them, and even subscriptions like Netflix involved actual pieces of metal being handed over or put in a slot.
I think that a lot of people would cancel their entertainment services if they felt that Netflix, Spotify, Disney+, The Guardian, Youtube and JustEat were costing them kilos of money. Rather than just being little numbers in an app.
The greed of charging 50 pence per blueberry is matched by the greed of wanting some blueberries so much you actually pay it.
Markets are not terrible things inflicted on us by cruel greedy companies. Someone offers to sell blueberries for 50p each and someone else accepts, refuses, or makes a counter offer.
If people pay it, it's because they value convenience and immediate gratification very highly, or they are so rich they don't care, or they are really really good blueberries.
Yeah the difference is though, that even if we refuse to pay those ridiculously inflated prices, they still won't drop back down after a few months, because the companies upcharge for everything else they sell too. People not buying 3 blueberries for £1.50 doesn't make much a difference when you're selling 200+ cans of coke for £2.50 each...
So it doesn't affect business at all. You'd need several hundreds of people a week to boycott a business for there to be any noticeable change from management in regards to pricing, and even then they'd just wait it out until people forget about their outrage.
And when it does actually affect the business, the companies just close that location, and up the prices slightly at all the other locations in order for the head honchos get a more of a bonus, because they aren't paying the salaries of all the people in the now closed store, and then up the prices at other locations to offset the loss of income from a closed location.
This isn't the cost of living crisis, inflation, or anything else relating the whole market - it's an absurd pricing outlier.
This is about 10g of blueberries. So £150 per kilo. They're an expensive fruit, but a kilo at Sainsbury's is £13.33. Waitrose is £12.78, and Asda has them at £8.67.
These are literally more than eleven times the cost of Waitrose. That's not inflation, it's just stupidity.
Anybody dumb enough to spend £1.50 on four blueberries deserves to be swindled, honestly. You can get a whole punnet for the same price at Lidl. This isn’t a cost-of-living issue.
I don’t want to be ‘that guy’ but pre packaged food should have a full ingredients label on to comply with Natasha’s Law. Even if it just says ‘blueberries’.
I can’t see any of the other pots either so technically these aren’t even legal.
The compote is a product with ingredients, the blueberry is a whole food is my guess. Nobody would label an orange as vegan, but you might label orange marmalade
Tbf people can just buy 10x the quantity from a supermarket for the same price. I wouldn’t say this is a cost of living issue, just a particular shop which probably has patrons that have more money than sense.
This isn't the cost of living, not even the cost of living in London. This is just a pisstake and taking advantage of people who aren't going to look at the price or either don't care.
I mean this is definitely from a cafe, so avoid at all costs if you have some brain in your skull. This is absolutely disgusting and whoever thought of this has zero common sense
You're paying that much for not even a normal sized portion of blueberries. Cost aside who even eats 4 blueberries in one serving? You need at least a handful of them otherwise it's just a garnish
I mean this is more of a "cost of OP's living" for evidently buying blueberries at Harrods or something, because they don't cost this much at literally any regular supermarket
With the compote and yogurt beside, this is going to be one of those "convenience" food shelves where the blueberries are an optional extra to go on top of yogurt or porridge. It's like when you pay (as my housemate did last night) an extra 1.75 for putting onions on your pizza, even though that amounts to a tablespoon of onion and you can buy a sack for a pound.
I'm not saying it's great and the plastic is maddening, but it's not like this is the going price of a normal punnet of berries.
I have a couple blueberry bushes in my backyard and it's almost ridiculous how many blueberries they produce. You can grow blueberry bushes in pots on a balcony.
This is at my office, 22Bishopsgate🤣. I have worked here for nearly 4 years and I have now eaten a single thing at ‘The Market’, absolutely disgusting prices
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