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

[venta.livejournal.com]

I like your icon :)

I was making red vegetable curry[*] the other night, and appeared to have detached my brain before I started. I was just musing that I'd done it wrongly, and cooked things in quite the wrong order, when I realised the chopped onion was still on the board. At which point I nearly gave up. If you're doing anything at the stove and the onion's not involved, you've pretty much gone wrong already.

[*] as in, Thai red curry. Most of the vegetables in it were actually green.

[rosenkavalier.livejournal.com]

If you're doing anything at the stove and the onion's not involved, you've pretty much gone wrong already.

*Heh* I can't think of the last time I cooked something which didn't involve onion...

[valkyriekaren.livejournal.com]

I made pasta last night with grilled asparagus, bacon and fresh baby plum tomatoes in a lemon butter dressing - that didn't involve any onion. But that was just using up the vegetables that were about to go off in the bottom of the fridge, not what I'd call proper cooking.

[triskellian]

I roasted a chicken on Saturday night, which had no onion in it, although there was copious garlic. There often is onion in my roasts (albeit in with the tatoes, not the meat), but I like roast onion much more than my dining companion does, which is also true of parsnips, and if I have parsnips and onions I start running out of room for tatoes, so I tend to alternate :-)

[triskellian]

Oh dear! That sounds terrible - halfway through cooking and the onion's still on the board? My sympathies!

[venta.livejournal.com]

Indeed :(

The garlic (how did I remember that and forget the onion?) and stock had to be asked politely to get out of the wok while I fried the onion. And indeed the vegetables.

It really wasn't a coherent cooking experience.

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

Now I would call that "vegetable red curry", although without having really thought about it.

If you were hypothetically making a green curry with fish, would that be "green fish curry"? Sounds revolting.

[venta.livejournal.com]

It would be if I made it. I think there's a reason menus often say "Thai green curry with fish" :)

[alien8.livejournal.com]

I can't eat onion... oh well :)

[venta.livejournal.com]

Flippin' 'eck! And I thought coeliacs had it bad :)

(Mind you, a friend of my mum's is at risk of fatal anaphyllactic shock if she eats... potato. I still think that's go to be the worst I've heard.)