While production costs may be higher for non-alcoholic drinks, economists say larger manufacturers are also using ‘price anchoring’ to maintain higher margins.
In 2023, Dr Cameron Shackell argued in The Conversation that “price anchoring” had been “used to reinvent and elevate the virgin drinks category by exploiting the fact we are used to paying high prices for alcohol in bottles”. Dr Shackell still believes anchoring – where consumers are influenced to accept the price of an item based on an earlier price – is at play.
“Their prices always seem to cluster around, let’s say, 5% or 10% lower than the alcohol prices … even though there are all these different [production] methods with different costs,” he says. “Who knows what companies are using what methods?"
