As part of an ongoing study, over the last seven days I've been looking at the price of a standard commodity in my neighbourhood, namely a 500ml PET bottle of Diet Coke. The variations in price are significant, 62% different to be exact. Click the image for a supersized version.
The NW corner of soho charges the highest mean prices, and the SE corner the lowest.
There is a slight correlation between the price of a bottle of diet coke and distance from one of the three tube stations.
The notion of location affecting price is entirely skewed by chainstores. These stores fix a national price, regardless of location, in this case EAT was the most expensive at 150p, but surprisingly a chainstore was also the cheapest, Greggs.
Supermarkets tended to be somewhere in the lower quarter of the price range, although not the lowest. The lowest prices were typically found in independant newsagents. That said, the supermarkets (including Boots), offered multi-deals, with deals such as '2 bottles for £1.80'.
The two high prices near to Oxford Circus were independant street shacks aimed squarely at tourists. No real surprises there, but the big surprise was the Burlington Café, topping out the survey at 175p. (Incidentally their 'eat in' price was 195p).
This will continue. The sample size is a little too small to make any concrete conclusions, but so far it's been interesting. There are some thoughts about crowd sourcing the research, but we'll see.
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