The road formerly referred to as 'The Birmingham Northern Relief Road', opens today. All being well it should make my journeys up to Manchester and Cheshire a lot easier.
Managing director Tom Fanning told a news conference .... "It is exceptional value for money - ã2 is the price of a cup of coffee"
Do they serve it in a gold cup or something? Aside from the fact I can't stand coffee, justifying the cost against extortionate prices for a beverage is hardly a good comparison.
I've not had the dis(pleasure) of needing to drive a long distance along a motorway recently, but I think that the price of tea is now over £1.50 in most of them. From memory, coffee was usually slightly more. I don't remember gold cups (actually, I don't even remember decent bone china cups), so I suspect the price is partly because they have a captive audience (where else do you get tea on a motorway), but partly because their costs are high. However, all this justification of extortion reminds me of Schwern's explanation of the cost of the POSIX standard.
Re:gold cups?
barbie on 2003-12-09T12:30:09
I find it so sad that prices for such a simple thing have escalated so high. In a regular truckstop cafe, of which I know a few along the Manchester to London route (which I travelled more times than I can remember), 50p-75p is a more normal price. Admittedly the Motorway services do have a captured audience and theoretically there is more hotwater in the metal container, but it's a bit pointless when half of it ends up on the floor.Their costs are not as high as you might think. The ex-singer of Ark used to work for Granada Services and staggered us by the amount of profit they make a day. I wish I had exact figures, but it was serveral thousands of our English pounds.
Still that's business, and if they didn't have a market, they wouldn't be able to charge those prices. I rarely eat or drink in motorway services anymore. It's much cheaper to go to the petrol station instead.
