How we set our prices, and what the impact might be if they changed.
We're committed to ensuring that the services we provide offer good value for money. We'd love to be able to make everything cheaper for you, but in reality need to make pricing decisions the reflect our costs and operating environment.
We try to offer deals and promotions that you love whereever possible to help you get the most bang for your buck!
How Our Prices Are Set
It will be fairly obvious that the prices we charge for things like a meal deal or bottle of VK are largely a result of what it costs us to buy these products.
We need to be able to cover this cost, plus the cost of running, staffing and managing our trading outlets. We are constantly evaluating what we stock and who supplies it to ensure we can get the best deal and reflect this in our prices.
We are part of the a national purchasing consortium through the NUS which helps us get bulk discounts by clubbing together with other SUs.
Our trading outlets also need to make a contribution to the costs of running some of our other services, as these aren't completely funded by our grant from the College. You can read more about that here.
What Other Factors Are There?
As well as the prices our suppliers charge and our running costs, we need to factor in taxes and levies dictated by the government. This includes VAT (Value Added Tax) on most items and specific charges like the carrier bag charge in our shop and the 'Sugar Tax' that is coming in soon - these are costs completely out of our control and don't contribute to our running costs at all.
Other government policies such as employment laws and health and safety rules have an indirect impact on prices as they require us to operate in certain ways, which often includes incurring a cost.
What If...
If we were to reduce the price of certain products or services, we'd have a decision to make - either to increase the price of something else to compensate for this, or reduce our expenditure elsewhere in the organisation. There are many possibilities here, but we've put togther a few of them a an illustration.
So head over to the What If... section of our new Value for Money page and have a go for yourself.