I came in here for that special offer: a guaranteed personality

[venta]

When I popped to Tesco last, I noticed several things which are intended to show the customer how seriously they are taking people's need to spend less. Many items have little flags showing them as "discount brands", the special offers seem to be on basics rather than on exciting new lines, and they have an example trolley by the door.

As you walk in, the example trolley is stacked with goods and has its till receipt blown up large and laminated. It's one of the shallow kind of trollies, and it is stacked full. I forget the exact total on the receipt, but I believe the thrifty customer is supposed to go "Wow! All that for just £50!"

This thrify customer looked at the bottom line and went "£50! For a week's shopping! You must be joking!"

Now, in fairness, I presume the trolley is intended to stay there as a dazzling incentive for some time, and thus it can't have greengrocery in it. Fruit and veg make up a fairly hefty proportion of my shopping, so it's not a fair comparison.

After my shopping trip, I have enough to feed myself for well over a week, some storecupboard basics and the household's kitchen and toilet roll requirements for the immediate future. I also have a bottle of beer as a present for my Dad, and my shopping was just over £15.

Admittedly, I had already bought some vegetables from a market stall at the weekend: I don't know about anyone else, but I'm an absolute sucker for the stalls which pile produce in bowls and offer you 'any bowl for £1'. A combination of delight at the sight of piled vegetables and a slight hint of the fairground hook-a-duck game has me purchasing bowls left, right and centre. They're often staggeringly good value if you have the capacity to use so much before it goes off. On which note, if anyone in Oxford wants some avocados, see me. I've got... quite a lot.

But even allowing for the extra shopping there and at the cheapjacks in Brent Cross, I spent less than £20. I shall eat well, and sometimes even excitingly, for a fraction of what Tesco thinks is bargain prices. I wouldn't even regard my shopping as rock-bottom; certainly I think there were things in it that I could have done without or replaced with something cheaper.

I am, of course, largely feeding just me - my meals will often stretch to include my housemates, ChrisC, or anyone else who's passing, but I don't have anything complicated like children to feed or look after. Even so... I don't understand a mindset which requires, in times of hardshop, convenience foods to become cheaper. The difference in price is the convenience and if you can't afford it, you have to live with the inconvenience of chopping up the damn vegetables yourself.

Maybe Tesco's approach should be to leave prewrapped, preprepared food prices as they are and instead print out cards with idiot-proof recipes for basic everyday dishes. I'm not sure customers would like it, but it might be much more useful. When people talk about "hardship" and mean that they have to switch to a less-luxurious brand of individually packaged chocolate biscuits, I'm inclined to say that they don't know the meaning of the word.

Please note this post was brough to you without the words "current", "financial" and "climate". That's fast becoming one of those phrases that you hear so often it's rendered meaningless. Beware the new CFCs.

Comments

[bopeepsheep.livejournal.com]

Mmmm, avocado...

Did you see the Jamie Oliver programme last week (next ep: tomorrow night)? Depressing watching, for many (complicated) reasons.

[venta.livejournal.com]

Me and the pictorial wireless don't really interact much :) I can just about work the iPlayer, though, so if it's on there would you recommend it ?

[bopeepsheep.livejournal.com]

It'll be C4's equivalent, whatever that is - oh, yes, looks like it's on there. Jamie's Ministry of Food.

"Recommend" is an interesting word - I think it's worth seeing, and I'm looking forward to seeing how it progresses, but I'm not promising you'll think it's wonderful tv. :)

[valkyriekaren.livejournal.com]

Yes, it seems quite peculiar to me that the 'financial crisis' seems to mostly consist of people thinking twice before making impulse purchases, and actually comparing prices at the supermarket. I was brought up to do this! If anything, I've had to slightly break my childhood conditioning in order to be able to treat myself without feeling guilty or forcing myself to go for the 'second-best' option.

It used to be more of a struggle until recently, as I'm slightly discalculate, so would struggle to work out in my head whether, say, 59p for 350g was cheaper than 85p for 500g. But now the supermarkets make it really easy by putting the equivalent price of a kilo below the pack price. So there's really no excuse.

I can't be the only person who actually looks at this stuff, can I?

[venta.livejournal.com]

Judging by the howling mistakes I often find on those price-comprison cards, I certainly don't think the person who prints them reads them!

[ulfilias.livejournal.com]

Yes....I love the way they try and throw you off the scent too, by having somethings in grams and others in kilos. I know its only decimal point shifting, but you would have thought things would be the same for the food type....

Also i've often noticed that two small things can sometimes be cheaper than the 'value' pack and last week in tescos they had a 2 for £4 offer on something and while there were a few items at £2.19 a lot of them were £1.98 !!!!

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

When people talk about "hardship" and mean that...

Some helpful definitions:

Crisis: An event so serious that it becomes difficult to utterly ignore it and carry on as normal.

Hardship: Barely perceptible changes in lifestyle brought on by a crisis (see above). Such as, for example, needing to look at the price of an item before purchasing it.

All this aside, I'm curious to know what was in their trolley.

[venta.livejournal.com]

I didn't go rootling about in it, but the obvious things were packets of biscuits, packets of cereal, and crisps. And lots of things which were in boxes, but I could only see an uninformative side of the box.

If it's still there next time I visit I'll have a proper rummage :)

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

It's kinda weird, because crisps and biscuits are actually very cheap. Possibly not quite as cheap as market veg, but certainly cheaper than most of Tesco's veg.

[rosenkavalier.livejournal.com]

Even so... I don't understand a mindset which requires, in times of hardshop, convenience foods to become cheaper. The difference in price is the convenience and if you can't afford it, you have to live with the inconvenience of chopping up the damn vegetables yourself.

This is something that I've increasingly noticed, and really can't get my head around - the idea that highly processed, pre-prepared foods are the staples which should be available to everyone, whereas it's only well-off people who would consider buying 'real' ingredients and making something from scratch... Very odd.

[venta.livejournal.com]

On a not-very-related note, I was intrigued to note a few months ago the "Tesco's ingredients" range: poshly-packaged herbs and spices, and a range of things like breadcrumbs, unusual flours, dried mushrooms, and so on. It looks quite exciting, it was just the name that amused me. They were all ingredients, but so was practically everything else in my basket :)

[bopeepsheep.livejournal.com]

I was commended, sometime last year, by narenek's mother, for "filling the kitchen cupboards with ingredients" (her emphasis). First, this grossly underestimates his ability and tendency to cook from scratch anyway, and second, isn't that what kitchen cupboards are for? I cannot imagine a kitchen with no ingredients whatsoever in it.

[triskellian]

Either Tesco or Sainsburys has an entire aisle devoted to 'cooking ingredients', which I find bizarre everytime I encounter it.

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

As with many things that retailers do, it's not aimed at us, it's aimed at the rich people who really do think they need to buy premium individually wrapped biscuits and pre-chopped vegetables. We are just inconvenient bystanders.

[venta.livejournal.com]

I don't think that the real luxury ingredients are the supermarkets' main money-spinner. I think low-end convenience food sold to people are not rich is really the main source of their sales.

[zandev.livejournal.com]

I am quite careful about not wasting money, but do so in a somewhat different way than most in supermarkets.

I'm quite flexible in what I eat, so I mainly look for good deals on high quality foods.

I also care about good food, which is why I do look for the premium ranges in the supermarkets (and why I'm pleased to find there is a Waitrose within walking distance of my new employer). The premium ranges are usually much more expensive than the basic ranges, but buying good ingredients and cooking them is still much cheaper than eating out, or even getting ready-meals.

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

Our local Sainsbury's has a similar trolley, except the giant price on it is comparing against buying the same things in Tesco's. Which, as it's all either convenience stuff or premium brands, is a matter of supreme irrelevance to me.

Although I do cook myself, I see it as something of a luxury to be able to take the time to do so -- I do sympathize with people who, because of the demands of children etc, believe themselves to be too short of time to cook. You can't make a pizza from scratch in the time you can bung a ready-made one in the oven, and really I don't think it would be any cheaper either -- although it would likely be nicer.

Of course, there are loads of other things that you can cook quicker and cheaper than the ready-made equiv, or that don't have ready-made equivs, but then that's not just learning how to cook, but also what to cook -- which is going to be difficult and time-consuming, if you weren't lucky enough to absorb the appropriate instincts at mother's knee like I was.

[venta.livejournal.com]

Yes. I should be grateful I did grow up in a household where cooking was the norm, and stop pointing fingers.

[lathany.livejournal.com]

but then that's not just learning how to cook, but also what to cook -- which is going to be difficult and time-consuming, if you weren't lucky enough to absorb the appropriate instincts at mother's knee like I was.

Definitely.

My mother hated cooking and I've picked up what I know (which is OK, but not incredibly much) through learning the few things she did do, cook books and housemates. In many ways, teaching Bea to cook has been the most useful phase in my learn-to-cook life.

[zandev.livejournal.com]

On the subject of supermarket pizza, Tesco at least seems to fairly regularly have amazing special offers on basic ready-made pizzas, which crucially can be frozen. We've fairly often used these as a base on which to put more toppings.

This usually manages to feed both of us well for dinner, for less than three pounds in total and with minimal effort. This is great for the times we can't be bothered to cook properly.

[erming.livejournal.com]

It was my Chemistry teacher at school's fault the CFC thingy.

His PHD proved that CFCs, which everyone thought were inert, could break down. He found the circumstances were when combined with Ozone and uv light.

[venta.livejournal.com]

Probably a good job he did work it out, really :)

[floralaetifica.livejournal.com]

£15-£20 for a weeks' shopping? How? Tell me how!

In the UK, £50 was my yard stick for my week's shopping. I hit it pretty consistently. Admittedly I bought a lot of pre-prepared stuff, because I hate cooking, it's a total waste of time and effort and I don't much like eating either. Here, I buy almost no preprepared stuff (which is why I'm utterly bored of my diet), but it still comes out roughly the same amount.

Really - if you have the time, I would be fascinated to know what on earth it is you're buying and cooking for £20 a week.

[venta.livejournal.com]

OK... give me til the end of the week, and I'll post approx. budget, shopping list and menus.

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

I would say about £15-20 as well (not counting booze, obviously). My cooking does rely on a pretty good store cupboard of herbs, spices, "ingredients" etc, so it costs to build that up in the first place, but it spreads out over a lot of meals.

I do cook a lot of beans, lentils and things though, so that wouldn't suit you. A tin of chickpeas for 45p is a sufficient protein component for a meal for two, so you're saving decent money right away just there.