logo
WHSmith prices 'should be illegal' after selling £4.19 Pepsi

WHSmith prices 'should be illegal' after selling £4.19 Pepsi

Welsh snooker legend Mark Williams recently posted a picture of a checkout screen in WHSmith, where it showed a 500ml bottle of Pepsi Max costing £4.19.
Williams was at Heathrow Airport at the time. Airports across the country are slightly notorious for charging inflated prices.
At the time of writing, a 500ml bottle of Pepsi Max from Tesco costs £1.59.
Customers subsequently blasted the store.
WHSmith pricing should be illegal in general, no clue how they get away with it https://t.co/MajNLaSHTg — Sel (@SA1903_) June 4, 2025
One said: "WHSmith literally sold off their entire High Street business but kept travel hub shops for this very reason. It's like printing money and they don't care about the customers."
Another commented: "Smiths are proper cosy cosy with all the airports, word is they mark up their prices by 50% and go halters with the airport the shops located in".
Someone else replied: "I paid that in Liverpool airport a couple of weeks ago, couldn't believe my eyes".
Another said: "WHSmith pricing should be illegal in general, no clue how they get away with it".
Some, however, defended the pricing.
Recommended reading:
Replying to the previous post, a user commented: "It's in an airport mate".
To which he responded: "Expensive in other WHSmith stores too hence why I said general".
Airports tend to be expensive due to a combination of factors, including high operational costs, the captive audience they serve, and the unique challenges of operating within a confined space.
These costs are then reflected in higher prices for food, beverages, retail goods, and services within the airport, as well as in airline ticket prices, which often include airport fees.

Orange background

Try Our AI Features

Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:

Comments

No comments yet...

Related Articles

Land value tax in Wales could replace council tax and rates
Land value tax in Wales could replace council tax and rates

South Wales Guardian

time40 minutes ago

  • South Wales Guardian

Land value tax in Wales could replace council tax and rates

The former first minister said the Welsh Government continues to explore the feasibility of LVT as used in countries such as Denmark and Singapore. Professor Drakeford has long supported a LVT, arguing those who have the privilege of ownership should pay something back for that privilege. LVT is levied on the value of the land rather than the property itself. Proponents argue LVT is easier to collect, more efficient and difficult to avoid, while discouraging speculation and encouraging people to bring idle land back into use. Professor Drakeford told the Senedd: "I am anxious to see this discussion move beyond the theoretical and into the realms of the practically possible. He explained that the Welsh Government has invited tenders to test approaches to valuing land, with submissions for every aspect of the work. The finance secretary said: "I want to use the coming months to test the boundaries of what might be possible in the next Senedd term. "Let's open the door to more radical, fundamental and progressive reform in the future." He added: "The current system is unfairly weighted against those who experience difficulty in paying. "I want to shift the focus from harmful escalation towards supportive prevention." He stated ministers will introduce a new council tax appeals process by April 2026 that will be "easier to navigate and provide a better, modern system for taxpayers". Peter Fox agreed that council tax is regressive by nature "and that it will never really become a fair local tax". Mr Fox accused the Welsh Government of increasing tax on families "by stealth" through underfunding councils which, in turn, pass on the shortfall to people. He called for reform of the "outdated and flawed" funding formula. Professor Drakeford replied: "Almost every local authority in Wales will agree that the formula needs revision – nobody can agree on how that should be done. "The 22 local authorities each believe that the formula uniquely disadvantages them."

Mark Drakeford tells Plaid Cymru leader he's 'very bad at listening' in heated exchange
Mark Drakeford tells Plaid Cymru leader he's 'very bad at listening' in heated exchange

Wales Online

time3 hours ago

  • Wales Online

Mark Drakeford tells Plaid Cymru leader he's 'very bad at listening' in heated exchange

Mark Drakeford tells Plaid Cymru leader he's 'very bad at listening' in heated exchange The former First Minister told the Plaid Cymru leader to 'listen to me' Wales' finance minister Mark Drakeford lost his cool with Plaid Cymru leader Rhun ap Iorwerth during a heated Senedd debate about rail funding. The former First Minister was delivering his closing remarks in a debate about today's spending review announcement by Chancellor Rachel Reeves. He turned to the Plaid Cymru leader, Ynys Mon MS Rhun ap Iorwerth, pointed and told him he was "very bad at hectoring". The UK Labour Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, today announced the government's spending plans for the next three years and a debate was scheduled in the Senedd to discuss it. ‌ One of the topics was £445m of funding announced for rail in Wales. Confusion emerged after the chancellor said that money was over 10 years, which would have meant the much-lauded announcement would mean Wales would have received less from Labour than under the Tories. For our free daily briefing on the biggest issues facing the nation, sign up to the Wales Matters newsletter here ‌ ‌Opposition parties jumped on the phrasing used by the chancellor. Yet briefings from Treasury officials and the Wales Office suggests it is more complex than that - although there is still a lack of detail about when the money will be spent, what it will be spent on and how much progress will be possible when the sum promised is less than the cost of the big ambitions for rail in Wales. You can read the full explanation here. Plaid Cymru members react as Mr Drakeford turns to Rhun ap Iorwerth (Image: Senedd TV ) The Treasury seemed to clarify the Chancellor's comments that of the £445m coming to Wales, the £350m would be spent in the next three financial years, not over a 10 year period. The 10 years, they said, referred to some £97m of money which is for developing future projects. Article continues below However, during the Senedd exchange, Mr Drakeford appeared to lose his cool with Mr ap Iorwerth. The pair had previously worked in partnership during the co-operation agreement. Mr Drakeford turned to Plaid Cymru and told them the £350m - a combination of £300m the UK Government will spend and around £48m the Welsh Government will get - will be spent in the next three years. Mark Drakeford points at Rhun ap Iorwerth during a heated debate over rail funding (Image: Senedd TV ) ‌ "Let's be clear," he said, "I know you don't like good news, but I am telling you, I am the finance minister here, would you like to listen to me? I would tell you, the Plaid Cymru leader, he is very bad at listening and very bad at hectoring." Mr ap Iorwerth then interjected quoting the chancellor's words "the Chancellor said £455m is coming over ten years, those were her words". Rhun ap Iorwerth looks on during the exchange (Image: Senedd TV ) ‌ Mr Drakeford then told him not to "make the same mistake for the fourth time, this afternoon". "The leader of Plaid Cymru is very bad at listening and very bad at hectoring people from where he sits, it's not an attractive trait, I can tell you that," he said. Mr Drakeford said £350m would come in the first three years, and an additional £90m over a 10 year investment strategy. "Wales will benefit from both," he said. Article continues below

JOHN MACLEOD: He's watching! My unsettling brush with Big Brother while buying sausage and onions in the local Tesco
JOHN MACLEOD: He's watching! My unsettling brush with Big Brother while buying sausage and onions in the local Tesco

Daily Mail​

time3 hours ago

  • Daily Mail​

JOHN MACLEOD: He's watching! My unsettling brush with Big Brother while buying sausage and onions in the local Tesco

The other day I noticed a mildly alarming development at our local Tesco. What had hitherto been a tiny, monochrome LED screen itemising each of my purchases, in cigarette-packet print, as the till-chick scanned everything through was suddenly as big as a copy of Cosmopolitan. In vivid Technicolor. With an image of every item and in very big print. I glanced right and left. It was the same at every other till. Each customer's shopping blaringly detailed for all to see. Today, mercifully, it was just sausages, onions, fresh thyme, and a bag of fresh chicken stock. But what if the screen had been regaling every adjacent passer-by with an itemised haul of, um, intimacies? It's bad enough when it's a bottle of Jamesons and some Williams Bros craft-ale. You can just imagine some onlooker's thought-bubble. 'Well, there goes Johnny Journo. Dylan Thomas: The Final Days.' But what of the day, decades hence, when my basket might include the products of deliverance from, as the commercials exquisitely put it, mild bladder weakness? As they say, every little helps. It is even worse at the self-checkouts. These I try to avoid. For one, I genuinely enjoy the brief social interaction with the lads and lasses manning real ones. For another, every different retail chain seems to use different machines and I can never remember on which side I may safely deposit my basket and on which as much as a fat carrot at once invokes the whine of 'Unauthorised item in the bagging area.' There is also an inordinately long list of items which cannot be sold to minors – stuff you probably would not think of: matches, kitchen-knives, bleach, glue and razorblades among them. So, again, the machine purses its digital lips, and there you are stuck till the harried attendant drifts over to confirm you are a verifiable old ruin, swipe his magic card and have a swift nosy at your messages. And worse – much worse – is to come. Across Britain, supermarkets are already rolling out artificial intelligence and autorecognition technology. In England and Wales, they can even hook up their facial-recognition cameras with police databases. VAR – the same technology that has already made football so farcical – is being deployed too. The selfsame tech that catches Erling Haaland's muscular behind offside now lurks, like a beast waiting to spring, lest you amble out of Asda with a can of sweetcorn you haven't paid for. Tesco, too, now trials such kit – though not, so far, in the Outer Hebrides. A wee bird's-eye camera will hang over each self-checkout, watching your every move. Should that Jolly Green Giant can not properly be scanned, it'll immediately play you a finger-wagging video – and, no doubt, in extremis, alert the hovering security-dude the size of a small house. Even a decade ago, most Brits would have balked at this sort of thing. In the Nineties, it would have been unthinkable. 'Some of this will make your life easier,' muses one observer. 'Some of it already does. But much of it asks for something in return: your data, your privacy, your patience, your trust. And not everything you're being asked to give is visible. 'This is not science fiction. It's not the future. It's your local Tesco.' Driving all this, of course, is the issue of what the trade calls 'shrinkage,' we call shoplifting and what our grannies called stealing. Annually, it costs British retailers billions. There were 516,971 offences recorded in 2024 – a signal leap from the 429,873 thefts logged the year before. But only one in five instances saw anybody charged: in more than half, no suspect could even be identified. Hence all this baleful new technology. The unsettling sense of being coldly studied by a machine. Watched, flagged, corrected and accused. That, actually, your caring sharing Co-op fundamentally distrusts you. Around 1990 that moral watchdog of the nation, the Free Church Presbytery of Lewis – unnerved by what had become a hedonistic and at times predatory Stornoway nightlife – called for closed-circuit television cameras to be dotted through the town. People stared, the tabloids tittered and the West Highland Free Press ran a very funny cartoon. No one could imagine anything as outlandish. Yet we have now had CCTV in the island capital for decades. From the Manor roundabout to outside An Lanntair, Big Brother is watching you. We are already well on the way to being one of the most surveilled societies in Europe. Even our most casual online browsing is eagerly monitored by all sorts of bots. When, fancying a new piece of kitchen kit, I casually Googled slow-cookers, for days on end thereafter adverts for said crockpots stalked me at every online turn. Retailers I had never heard of even sent me emails. Not everyone will tolerate this. The Germans will not stand for CCTV and, save where it is genuinely vital for public safety – like airports – you will see no cameras anywhere. That reflects not just dark folk-memory of the Nazis, but the decades much of the country then endured under a Communist dictatorship – a society so bleak, so grey and so stifling that, as President Kennedy cracked, 'We do not need to build a wall to keep our people in.' From secret policemen, regular informers and the occasional grass, it's reckoned that one in 6.5 East Germans worked for the Stasi. In Tirana, the Albanian capital, under the long night that was Enver Hoxha's Communist regime, the state could rely on one in three. Indeed, I am old enough to remember when much of rural Lewis, into the present century, felt like something very similar. People kept binoculars by their main window. Wizened crones knew every car and every numberplate. Murmured if you skipped church; found an excuse to drop by if you received a mysterious visitor or if Donny the Post had dropped off a strange parcel. Boys and girls courted, of necessity, in the hours of darkness: ministers did not dare step out of the manse, of a Saturday, lest there be talk of their casual disregard for sermon preparation. It sounds hilarious, but it was to some degree genuinely oppressive and why, for so many young islanders, getting on meant getting out. My mother still remembers an occasion in 1988 when, home on holiday, she joined my father, a senior clergyman, on a spin to the village where he had been born. He was casually dressed, they told no one where they were going, the latest family car had never been on the island before and they did not stop until they reached his uncle's croft. And they were not ten minutes in the house when the phone rang. It was a couple several townships away whom my father had signally helped when, months earlier, their son had died in tragic circumstances in Edinburgh. The Reverend Professor must now call on them, he must put up a word of prayer with them, and he must do it now. So much for that day of holiday. 'And you know what?' my mother still cackles darkly. 'After all that, they joined the Free Church Continuing.'

DOWNLOAD THE APP

Get Started Now: Download the App

Ready to dive into the world of global news and events? Download our app today from your preferred app store and start exploring.
app-storeplay-store