Not the end of the word by any means, but irritating nonetheless.
Slowly but surely, a lot of the foods I like keep disappearing from stores. I live in a large town (pop.4K or thereabouts) with around 5 large superstores but very few traditional businesses left. We are pretty stuck with that for now, along with online shopping.
Just for the sake of example, our massive Tesco is now phasing out both Hellmann's organic and vegan mayo, outdoor bred and nitrate free bacon, most organic meat, fresh tuna and sea bass, free range chicken and fresh soup. They have also recently not bothered to re stock their own brand organic eggs, apples, pears and blueberries for the past few yrs, so I'm wondering if it's a demand issue. But this is a large town and most of those products are pretty common in other places, if we travel to another locality.
I can find the eggs if I travel further to badly stocked M&S and Sainsbury's on the edge of town, but for the past few weeks even those have dropped the ball.
Since late last year I've lost my favourite bread (in both Tesco and M&S), and now have to order lactose free milk online or travel a good way. I can't even find my old staple sushi rice. I have noticed that many of these items are still available at 'other' Tesco's when I've had a look around.
It is becoming more and more difficult to source organic or non typical goods locally, whilst this never used to be the case, so it's not as if our town was never stocked with them previously - on the contrary they seemed to sell well.
Recently been away to much smaller places and this stuff seems to be selling just fine. Is it happening to anyone else, or could it be this location? I honestly doubt it's all a supply issue if it can be found 5 miles down the road. Just seems like a slow and steady eradication of choice, even the Polish/Japanese/Indian shelves are shrinking. The fresh fish counters are all but gone now, although they hung on for dear life at Sainsbury's for a while.
I get it, some of these things might be considered less in demand than others, but it's like most of our local businesses are choosing a more dumbed down product line - non free range eggs make up the majority of shelf space at Lidl and Asda. There seems to be a huge range of choice, but only at the cheaper end of the scale, with processed shit in the absolute majority.
Even accounting for cost of living issues, this does seem fairly isolated at present, so this is why I am wondering if anyone else has noticed it.