Pretty much everyone I know who eats meat is a biltong fiend.

Vegans aside, it’s not often I meet someone who has the ability to eat a few slivers and then pop it away for later.

Now unless you make your own you’re probably used to dealing with some pretty steep prices, and it’s here that South African biltong retailers are being very sneaky.

TimesLive checked out a bunch of spots selling the meaty goodness in KZN, and they had one thing in common:

A young woman working at a biltong outlet in an upmarket KwaZulu-Natal mall — where loose beef biltong sells for R350 per kilo — was more candid than most: “My boss says the price would repel customers because it’s so high, they can buy it a lot cheaper at Pick n Pay.”

When the Sunday Times asked an attendant at a biltong kiosk at the Engen One Stop in Cato Ridge for the (undisplayed) price of the biltong per kilo, she said: “About R250.”

But the scale revealed the price of sliced beef biltong to be a hefty R390 per kilo.

Willie Scheun, who owns Nuts About Biltong in Benoni’s Western Extension and sells loose beef biltong for R199 per kilo, said displaying biltong prices was bad for business.

“If you have to put the price up, then you get a lot of complaints and sales slow.”

…At the biltong kiosk in Pick n Pay’s La Lucia branch, no per-kilo prices are displayed on the trays of loose beef biltong. When asked for the price, the attendant consulted a sticker on her side of the display before responding: “R249.99 a kilo.”

So displaying prices is bad for business – got it. The problem is that you kind of have to show what you’re charging:

According to the Consumer Protection Act, which came into effect six years ago, such an act is illegal as a “retailer must not display any goods for sale without displaying to the consumer a price in relation to those goods”.

…consumers who simply ask the person at the counter for “R50 Spicy” won’t know that at R390 a kilogram, that’s very pricey Spicy and they’d get a lot more biltong for their buck if they went to the butcher or kiosk down the road.

And price increases are very easy to implement if your customers aren’t aware of the per-kilo price — they may not notice that their R30 or R50 has bought them fewer pieces of biltong.

If you ask National Consumer Commission spokesman Trevor Hattingh everything is under control, with the organisation regularly checking that retailers display prices for consumers to check.

I guess those outlets mentioned above are the exception, although the last time I walked into a biltong shop I was also left scratching my head as to what each product actually cost.

We know we’re generally paying top dollar for biltong, but the very least we should ask for is some kind of price on display.

Good thing we have Henk in the office who makes his own – nudge nudge.

[source:timeslive]