Magento: Quantity corresponding to minimum price tier

When displaying a product summary for a product with tiered pricing, Magento shows the user how much they can save by showing the minimum price (including tax). Especially with the way the string "As low as" is translated to other languages, this can be confusing and you might want to show the quantity of the product the customer needs to buy to get it at the displayed minimum price. Unfortunately, while Magento has the getMinimalPrice method to retrieve the lowest tier price, it doesn't have a convenient function to retrieve the corresponding tier quantity.

Finding quantity corresponding to minimal price tier

I wanted to add the quantity to the pricing display in app/design/frontend/default/*template*/template/catalog/product/price.phtml. It's quite a horrendous file where it's tough to find stuff, but search for the string "as low as" and you'll find the right place. You would think you could retrieve the pricing tiers by calling the getTierPrices method with the current product (available as $\_product) as parameter. This always returns an empty array, in my experience. Instead, we have to take the roundabout way of re-retrieving the product collection and retrieving the pricing tiers for each product in it. Here's how:

getCollection ()    -

Sidebar: showing the price excluding tax

Since the store I'm working on targets other businesses, not consumers, I need to display the price excluding VAT. The default template show the price including VAT. This is done through the code currency($\_minimalPriceDisplayValue,true,false);. To display the price excluding taxes, use the variable $\_minimalPriceValue instead.