Why is railway catering such a rip off?

[BahrainLad]

Not quite stations or Airports but try St Marks Square in Venice or around the harbour in St Tropez for extortionate prices.

In both of those places you’re not actually buying a drink, what you pay rents your table for an hour so you can see / be seen.

 

[Dr Hoo]

Not sure that is strictly correct. I thought 170101-170110 were procured for MML services and had a built in buffet in the centre car. These later migrated to Central Trains thence to XC

The 170s initially came as 2-car sets. The centre cars, with buffet counter and First Class in lieu of the ghastly end saloons, came later and weren't added to all the units anyway. Trolley catering in the 2-car sets was an inefficient mess.

Be careful what you promise!

 

[Y Ddraig Coch]

If you remember Brief Encounter, supposedly set at Carnforth (LMS) station, it had the classic old-fashioned refreshment room run by a dragon behind the counter.
(I remember the refreshment room on Chester station used to be just like that when I first used it in 1961 - Lyons Individual Fruit Pie anyone?).
Today's facility at Carnforth is not the usual SSP outlet, but is privately run and a pleasure to use.
They piggy-back on the film's legacy of course, but they've replaced the dragon with customer-friendly staff.
There are a few other non-SSP-run refreshment rooms of course, Llandudno Jn being one.
None of these businesses have had an easy 18 months with Covid of course, and high prices are not surprising as they try and rebuild.
Prices on the high street are on the way up too.

There hasn't been anything good value from the Llandudno Junction offering in my visits. I found it very expensive slow and poor quality. I walk across to asda.

I'm not actually sure the cafe is still open thinking about it.

 

[Llandudno]

Unless you have a short connection time at Wigan, then there's plenty of places on Wallgate you could go for cheap snacks/meal deals. You could even walk past about 3 if you were going between Wallgate and North Western.

Fabulous bakery and pie shop just a few yards up on the same side as NW station.

 

[Pigeon]

Time for a return to Travellers Fare

Back in the 80s there where the same gripes about their prices too.

There are always gripes about any prices for anything, but the gripes in this thread have a deal more justification than the gripes back then.

When BR did their own catering I was reasonably happy to make use of it as it was not too difficult to get a quantity of food worth eating for the money. Booze, too. It wasn't cheap to buy a few cans and gently pickle myself over the course of a long journey, but it wasn't grossly unreasonable either.

Then there came a gap where BR weren't doing it any more and nobody else was either, or if they were they were always shut, and you had to hope for a functioning coin-in-the-slot machine to get an expensive and stunted bar of chocolate from if you were desperate.

When the third party operations finally began to exist in reasonable numbers and to remain open for longer than just the busiest weekday hours, they were already unsatisfactory: twice or more the old-style prices for physically smaller items from a less comprehensive selection. So now the situation had effectively become a choice between stunted chocolate if you were desperate, or third-party buffet-replacement if you were really desperate, which didn't really count as much of an improvement.

Since then the state of things has basically remained the same in nature while exaggerating itself, so now we have multiple third party operations in the same location and they are all crap, selling bite-sized items at prices which place them beyond consideration no matter how desperate you are.

The result is that I have gone from making use of railway catering with only moderate reluctance to refusing to make any use of it whatsoever, despite having (slightly) more money now than I did then.

People used to make jokes about British Rail sandwiches but they did not correspond to reality even at the time. I ate plenty of those sandwiches and there was never anything about them to take exception to. They were entirely unexceptional examples of the standard sandwich made with plastic bread: not as good as one freshly made with real bread, but notably better than one made with real bread after it has been festering in your lunch box for a couple of hours. Just like today's supermarket sandwiches, in fact. The only major point of dissatisfaction was that they were too often out of stock of anything that didn't have tomatoes in (even the residue remaining after extracting unwanted slices of tomato is enough to put me at risk of throwing up).

The era of the real station buffet also had the inestimable advantage that there was only one of them and it was an integral part of the station buildings. You didn't have to put up with this proliferation of innumerable fancy portakabins encroaching on the pedestrian space, getting in the way and blowing out smells and hot air into what in sunny weather is often already an excessively hot and stuffy area. And you could go inside and sit down and eat your meal off a plate with a knife and fork in a civilised fashion, instead of carrying it off to the train in a paper bag and spraying crumbs and grease all over the place.

The one point where they did fail was in not providing a decent cup of tea, although even there they were still both cheaper and far better than the standard dishwater made in a paper cup using a half-sized teabag and some appalling concoction called "whitener" that you get these days. It is ridiculous how this country with its legendary tea obsession is so amazingly crap at providing an even remotely decent cup of it in a catering context. So I have fond memories of taking a bottle of water, a bottle of milk, a box of tea leaves, a teapot, a mug, and a camping stove along in my bag and brewing up on the floor of a Mk 1 compartment. I suppose these days they would slit your stomach open and hang out your intestines to dry along the lineside fence for even thinking of that.

In both of those places you're not actually buying a drink, what you pay rents your table for an hour so you can see / be seen.

Same principle as buying coffee from Caffe Caca and parading around drinking it from a cup with the name of the seller in big letters on the outside and sneering at people who have bought theirs from somewhere slightly cheaper. Or doing your shopping at Lidl and taking it home in Waitrose bags. Moronic monkey status games are universal at all levels, and their huge potential for facilitating the extraction of unreasonable sums of money from said monkeys is definitely one significant factor in shoving up the prices for food sold for consumption in the sight of hundreds of other monkeys waiting for their trains.

 

[RT4038]

You know, for a moment, I thought you might be right. A lot of people hallucinated the entire 1990s, I'm sure I did too. Infact, I must have hallucinated the memories from working at that exact catering company myself, dragging a trolley up and down trains on twelve hour shifts for several years flogging coffee (Kenco, either black or with powdered milk) at £1 and or PG Tea at 90p, or Hot Chocolate (also £1) on a flatbed Kenco trolley. Well, I thought I dreamt it up until I dug out a lodgement invoice sheet from Express Catering Limited (registered office Chester, later Nottingham) with a top up order from their service centre from 12 October 2000. I could bore you with the entire order I put in, including the type of biscuit used (Walkers Luxury Shortbread) but I'm hoping at this point you realise it may not have been a pipe dream.

You miss the rather obvious answer to you questions in my first post.... shortsighted greed from bosses who had probably never been on a train. £1 became £1.10, £1.70, £1.90, £2.05 etc.

I hear there may be at least five other fellow hallucinating trolley staff from Express Catering on here, I will advise them to all seek help.

Yes, you've stated what the prices were, which I have no reason to doubt you. And I've no reason to doubt that you and your colleagues worked very hard placing top up orders etc.

What I am sceptical about is the quantity of profit (if indeed there was any) Apparently one of the partners was so happy with his profit that he walked out (so as not to get any more?). Really? The other then became greedy and started putting up the prices and charging staff for uniforms etc- or had he realised that there was no profit (or not enough profit) and needed to increase prices/reduce costs in the forlorn hope that the profit margin might appear or increase?

The fact that no other company since has gone for the low price / high turnover model is possibly indicative that the finances (profits) just do not work. Every entrepreneur can't have shortsighted greed !

I've often thought this myself. The actual cost of ingredients for hot drinks must be trivial - maybe 10p to 20p per cup including the cup itself and other costs. So selling three cups at £1 generates similar profits to selling one cup at £2.50.

But, while the trolley is stopped in front of you, and you're getting out your wallet or card to pay anyway, most people will add a packet of biscuits or crisps, or a cake, to go with their drink.

Which sounds like the classic win/win - more sales and profits for the operator, and travellers happy because they've paid a sensible price for their tea or coffee. So is there a snag in this logic, or is it just that accountants seeing losses can't think beyond "we must put the price up"?

But does this model end up with an acceptable level of profit for the catering operation? Experience seems to show that it doesn't.

 

[jon0844]

If you sell too cheap, you'll surely end up with long queues that will put people off waiting, given the whole reason for buying at a station is the fact you (most likely) didn't plan ahead well enough!

I am not sure a small kiosk on a platform/concourse is quite the same as an Amazon bulk box shifting enterprise. Of course, there are many ways to upsell and provide better value, such as a bundle/meal deal.

No they're not - Nespresso offer a free recycling service by post for example

Wasn't there a report some time ago that they collecting old pods but didn't actually recycle them?

 

[Meerkat]

Wasn't there a report some time ago that they collecting old pods but didn't actually recycle them?

Recycling still requires transport, energy, and water.
Recycled or not those silly little pots seem incredibly wasteful and ungreen

 

[Metal_gee_man]

Are there any supermarkets or similar with a decent lunch offering near Victoria station in London? I'll be there around lunchtime one day next week


Not good for the environment though as the capsules are an unrecyclable mix of aluminium and plastic

It depends on whether you've got the time and effort, above the Southern platforms 15 -20 is Victoria Place and there is a Sainsburys Local, plenty of normal priced shops and reasonable fast food and restaurants too, the challenge is purely time and effort because you are basically at the furthest end of Victoria Place very close to the coach station a good few minutes from the main concourse

 

[jon0844]

Recycling still requires transport, energy, and water.
Recycled or not those silly little pots seem incredibly wasteful and ungreen

Indeed, and one reason why I don't drive to a recycling centre just to recycle - I plan to coincide with a journey I'd be making anyway (albeit with a slight detour).

 

[matacaster]

As the major cost is staffing on board a train, perhaps automated machines might be a useful addition as they are far more intelligent and reliable than they used to be.

Moderator note: this idea is under discussion at https://www.railforums.co.uk/threads/vending-machines-on-trains.220514/ ; please continue the discussion there, thanks.

 

[deltic]

In 2019 SSP turned over nearly £2.8bn and made profits of £220m ie a margin of just 8%. Concession fees were £550m which is mainly rent and revenue sharing with landlords and shows where a significant proportion of what you pay for station catering goes to - ie it keeps rail fares down!

 

[bspahh]

Time for a return to Travellers Fare

This is from a Comic Relief with Ben Elton

There's people wondering, do they have time enough to get themselves a coffee, a cheese and tomato baguette - great value 65 quid, nice one - and while you're there can you get me a triple thick shake from the Casey Jones big Mac Whopper dog burger and that industrial suction pump so I can get it up the straw.

 

[Journeyman]

Coffees of the same kind is the same to me from any coffee shop. If there are multiple coffee shops the only criteria for me is the price.

Nah. Starbucks is revolting compared to Nero or Costa.

 

[extendedpaul]

The (Metro) newspaper vouchers for McDonalds are accepted at railway station outlets. They haven't increased from £1.99 for at least ten years and now work out under half menu price, I usually add a coffee or ice cream for 99p. Not to everyone's taste but £2.98 all in is a good deal.

 

[whoosh]

It is ridiculous how this country with its legendary tea obsession is so amazingly crap at providing an even remotely decent cup of it in a catering context.

Have you seen this clip of Dave Gorman talking about buying tea from a station?

 

[Starmill]

There used to be a budget tea and sandwich place called the Bread Box at Manchester Piccadilly. It was closed some years ago and the unit it occupied was conveniently removed thereafter. Today there stand vending machines for hand sanitiser and dislosible gloves and masks where it once stood. I always wondered if it was removed in order to increase the yield of the other nearby units, because it was too much cheaper than e.g. the James Martin Kitchen outlet.

 

[Jozhua]

I didn't know about SSP. The funny thing is that, like a lot of these places, almost all of the food is pre-packaged long shelf life stuff, so the margins must be absolutely insane!

Funny thing as well, they say "specialists in travel", but a lot of what they offer is terrible for the travelling market. Especially Burger King. Once waited an hour for a Burger at Manchester Airport!

The worst part is they provide little to no healthy options and certainly don't cater for any dietary requirements. The only thing they are useful for resolving immediate low blood sugar or incredible thirst.

If you are not happy with the price pack your own butties and a flask

I think there is something to be said for bringing your own food to an extent, but I do reject this argument.

Journeys by public transport can take a while and you may not always be in a position to be able to prepare food ahead of time. If we want rail to be competitive, then we need to consider all the factors that contribute to a good or bad journey.

Yes I once paid £6 for a small piece of cake and a cup of tea at Geneva ( this was in the 90's!)

To be fair, the prices in Switzerland are very high in general. £5 for a bottle of coke isn't unheard of.

I've got to be desperate and I mean really desperate to buy food or drink on railway stations. Never ever do I buy food or drink onboard trains as their prices are worse than the stations.

Exception is Manchester Piccadilly only because Sainsbury's there charge near normal Sainsbury's prices. However, as mentioned upthread there is a co-op just outside the station. There's also a Gregg's outside too.

Sheffield station is an odd one though as although it's got the regular high price outlets, the Superdrug there is usually the best priced food outlet. Downside is that it's inside the front of the station so if you're only changing trains there and aren't going anywhere near the main front entrance you won't know Superdrug is there.

That Sainsburys is good! In general Piccadilly Station is one of the best for choice in that regard.

 

[Gloster]

Although I haven’t travelled so much in recent years, for at least a decade I have pretty well limited my purchases on Network Rail stations to coffee. Everything else would be either taken with me from home or bought at a shop wherever I was. For some years the only regular exception was at Chichester, where there was a buffet on the Down side that sold a perfectly adequate cup of tea for less than a pound (even six or seven years ago) and snacks that were only marginally above shop prices. And then one day it had gone and been replaced by a swish new place with a very limited menu. As I had forgotten to get anything I was prepared to stretch to a cheese and tomato panino, until I was told that I must have it heated up, whether I liked it or not. As I didn’t that purchase was not made and I haven’t been in since.

I have occasionally used the buffet at Barnham, which was another reasonably priced establishment. I hope it is still going, but it may not fit in with the modern ethos.

 

[johntea]

To be fair the SSP franchised Sainsbury's, Boots and M&S food are far more reasonably priced, broadly in line with the supermarkets own pricing. A Sainsbury's has just opened in York opposite the existing overpriced SSP brand shop. Given the massive price difference they are going to have to up their game or will end up losing trade.

We noticed there was a Sainsbury’s at York station yesterday and were delighted!

How the nearby outlets expect any customers at all now I have no idea (the layout of this station in particular making them virtually next to each other apart from the Pumpkin track side)

If I was running one of these outlets my strategy would be to pile high and sell cheap (or at least ‘reasonable’) rather than try and rely on the handful of passengers with far more money than sense

 

[Hadders]

To be fair the SSP franchised Sainsbury's, Boots and M&S food are far more reasonably priced, broadly in line with the supermarkets own pricing. A Sainsbury's has just opened in York opposite the existing overpriced SSP brand shop. Given the massive price difference they are going to have to up their game or will end up losing trade.

There are independents out there, the station buffet in Huddersfield is renown amongs staff for cracking bacon sandwiches and often open up early for night shift staff passing through. Northallerton had one but the lease contract was terminated so a SSP franchise could move in. That never happened and the unit still lies empty....

SSP do not operate any Sainsbury's stores.

 

[LNW-GW Joint]

All this will have to be grasped by Great British Railways when it bursts into life (on-train catering too).
Will they leave it to the TOCs as now, or impose some order by means of pricing?
The commercial franchises had no DfT requirement or specification for catering (or first class, or car parks, other bones of contention).
GBR will have to decide all this as well as ticketing and customer service standards.
Currently station rental income from retail outlets is important to Network Rail's balance sheet - will that be in GBR's orbit in the future?
The issues are rather more than "the price of this coffee/snack/beer is a rip-off".

 

[24Grange]

Indeed - also did have a thought just now. Catering spaces ( with few exceptions) ( HST with integral buffet cars almost gone) have been designed out of trains now ( apart from minimum space for trolley recharge/refill in a widened vestibule type). All comes down to what ambiance or " extras" does DfT/GBR want to offer - minimum reintroduce trolleys - more expensive convert some seating bays ( or similar) back to buffet type with counter and microwave.

 

[Bletchleyite]

I didn't know about SSP. The funny thing is that, like a lot of these places, almost all of the food is pre-packaged long shelf life stuff, so the margins must be absolutely insane!

Funny thing as well, they say "specialists in travel", but a lot of what they offer is terrible for the travelling market. Especially Burger King. Once waited an hour for a Burger at Manchester Airport!

The worst part is they provide little to no healthy options and certainly don't cater for any dietary requirements. The only thing they are useful for resolving immediate low blood sugar or incredible thirst.

Have you ever been in a station M&S? Pretty good there, and that's SSP too.

 

[philthetube]

Have you ever been in a station M&S? Pretty good there, and that's SSP too.

I suspect that M&S make them work within parameters, they will not want their mane dragging down

 

[Meerkat]

Have you ever been in a station M&S? Pretty good there, and that's SSP too.

M&S are expensive by default!

 

[pitdiver]

In both of those places you’re not actually buying a drink, what you pay rents your table for an hour so you can see / be seen.

I always thought that is what you did in Starbucks or Costa.

 

[Bald Rick]

There used to be a budget tea and sandwich place called the Bread Box at Manchester Piccadilly. It was closed some years ago and the unit it occupied was conveniently removed thereafter. Today there stand vending machines for hand sanitiser and dislosible gloves and masks where it once stood. I always wondered if it was removed in order to increase the yield of the other nearby units, because it was too much cheaper than e.g. the James Martin Kitchen outlet.

Bread Box was SSP. There was one at London Bridge too. It didn’t do very well.

The commercial franchises had no DfT requirement or specification for catering (or first class, or car parks, other bones of contention).

Yes they did (and do).

 

[Bletchleyite]

M&S are expensive by default!

The quality and variety is excellent, though. Always enjoy an on train "deli buffet" lunch from there.

 

[py_megapixel]

The Pasty Shop is one to avoid. Assuming they've labelled things correctly, they want not much less than £7 for a single cornish pasty.

You know how much I could get for that money in Gregg's... (!)