Would you be interested in saving money on your groceries? Want to save over 60% on your teas? Earth’s General Store can do just that when compared to David’s Tea, a popular national chain of tea store.

Why we compared our prices with David’s Tea?

Over the past two weeks two incidents have caused me to dig deeper into the prices of our teas in comparison with this chain.

The other week one of my staff told me that they had bought some very nice Banaspaty Assam tea from David’s Tea. She did not know we carried this tea from the same region in India. I decided to do some investigation.

There were some differences:

• our Banaspaty tea is certified organic AND Fair Trade certified
• our tea is priced at 12$/100gm and according to their website you can buy 100gm for 17.80$. This is over 2.5 times more expensive than the product we offer.

PS – for the extra 62% cost to you from David’s you do get a nice tin can but do you think that can is worth 40-60$s? At our store we encourage you to bring in your own container therefore reducing the resources needed to make more and more containers – Refill, Don’t Landfill!

The other incident was that a customer ordered in some Egyptian Nile Delta Chamomile/camomile. When we received it I realized that we had mispriced it over the past few years. We were selling it for 19% below our cost (not a good business model). When I told the person that ordered in the 3 kilograms of it they told me that they thought we had made a mistake and the new price was still very reasonable. I decided to investigate this tea as well.

There were some differences:

• Our supplier described the tea as Egyptian Chamomile and our supplier called it Nile Delta Camomile from Egypt.
• Our tea was priced at 6.20$/100gm and David’s was priced at 13.80$/100 grams. This was a slightly over twice the price that we charge for chamomile from the same region in Egypt.

This significant price difference really surprised me so I decided to check several others since we carry almost 60 different varieties of tea/tisanes and 27 of them were carried by David’s.

Here is the list I came up with:

Tea Price Comparison Chart

The descriptions used in this table are what we use for our teas. There will be times that we list a tea as Fair Trade and/or Organic but David’s Tea may not have those designations.

The largest amount that David’s lists on each of their teas is 500gm. Of course David’s Tea might have a price per kilogram that would be less. Our price is regardless of the quantity you purchase since all of our loose teas are sold by weight so there is no penalty or reward for buying more or less. I based the comparison on the the 100gm size they offer since this is about what the average person would purchase. If I compared the prices based on their standard 50gm tins then the difference is a little greater and less if you were buying their 500gm package.

Conclusions

David’s Tea is a successful specialty tea company and has caught the awareness with regards to the health benefits of teas. I like that David’s Tea is a Canadian company.

BUT if you want to save some serious money on your tea purchases you might want to check out our offering.

If you are interested in checking out our listing of our teas you can do so online (photos and graphics coming soon) and of course you can drop into the store and see what we have available since smelling the teas is very pleasant.

The prices quoted in this article were in effect on the date it was published to the internet.