Why are fish and chip shops in England so tightfisted?

[Saltnvinegarnsauce]

No free sauce? Always giving you these crappy little sachets of ketchup? Not even having decent brown sauce.

Cheapskates. Free the sauce

If they had bottles, the bottles would get stolen, used as a weapon, will need wiping, everyone will have touched them. If squeeze, I guarantee someone will squeeze it everywhere necessitating someone cleaning it up

Probably for the same reason why so many are closing @Saltnvinegarnsauce

• people are tight fisted and dint want to pay the real price for their fish and chips….. So they can’t afford to add small luxuries such as sauce. They can’t even afford to keep going….

Gravy or curry sauce only no.ketchup.or brown sauce

In Edinburgh they have Brown sauce on chips, wrong un's

And people make a bloody mess of it.

Saying that none of my local chippies ever put salt and vinegar on the side and it's been this way for nearly 20 years.

Must be something to do with hygiene.

Cost of cooking oil, electricity, not to mention the cost of fresh fish, quite happy to pay for any sauce or extra I want.

It’s not brown sauce it’s chippy sauce, I mean, it’s brown coloured obviously, but it’s not the same brown sauce as the ones called brown sauce.

But that and tomato sauce are in bottles, but in their side of the counter - so they just put it on at the same time as salt or vinegar.

Chippy sauce is the way forward. It's sacrilege to put ketchup on fish and chips.

It's the same as everything else these days - more expensive and anything that can be seen as "extra" you get gouged for.

It's lovely, isn't it? So deliciously British....we're left clearly understanding everything that is wrong about our choice to use sauce (it's common, it's not what the Right Sort would do, the posters are so sophisticated they barely know what this oik-ish muck is, it's highly processed, it's full of sugar and salt, it is THE WRONG THING TO DO) yet none of this is explicitly said to us. The power of punctuation. It's a subtle art.

The chippies down here( South Coast) are way more tasty (unsurprising as near the sea) and much more generous with their portions etc than the miserable shriveled rubbish I received last time I was in my home city of Glasgow, I am sad to say. I used to stick my nose up at the cod on offer but the "haddock" I received up by had no taste whatsoever. Free sauce etc too.
Pity they don't do pakora n sauce doon here though. Cannae beat Glesga pakora.

What do you mean by sauce? Ketchup? No one in my area puts ketchup on fish and chip shop chips. It's salt and vinegar if you want it, which they put on for you and you can have as much as you want, curry sauce, which comes in a tub large or small, mushy peas or beans. They're generous with sizes of fishes and chips.

Why are people putting "sauce"?

Thats also a London thing. Everywhere else ive had fish and chips in England usually has the skin off. I dont have fish and chips anymore unless im back in Yorkshire with family, where they are always skin off and delicious 😋

Skin on growing up in the North West.... and near my dsis who is in Yorkshire.
Skin off in our local (SE).

boyfriend is from Edinburgh and I always have a bottle of ‘chippy’ sauce in its not great but he likes it. I remember being at uni in Edinburgh and being asked re salt and sauce I had NO idea
it’s ok when pissed though
I never put sauce on anything except gravy on roast

Our village hasn't any chippy,Chinese or Indian.
We have a mobile chippy van. So I grab my small chips and small curry sauce then walk the 19 meters back home and use my own ketchup on the lot.
The don't do batter bits/ scraps though.

Interesting! Never had them in the NW. In Yorkshire, had them around Harrogate, Thirsk, York, Scarborough, Whitby and Hull always with skin off. The south coast (Hampshire / Southampton / Brighton etc) also had them skin off. Ive given up trying to find a good one in London now 😒

I love how there can be so many regional differences on something that so many people love!

The bottles aren’t available to the public! They ask you "salt n sauce?" and the correct answer is "lots of sauce please" and they add the sauce. No mess and no weapons

What kind of chippy is this that you risk getting something thrown at your head?!

Drunk people can get fairly unreasonable and violent in the most unexpected places. I had a drunk customer launch a book at my head at a Scout jumble sale so I can imagine a chip shop after pub kicking out time want to keep throwable items at a minimum.

Free tartare sauce and a slice of lemon and a buttered slice at ours. Waitress always offers sauce and I saw a couple at the next table dousing their chips in ketchup the other day which looked disgusting, but each to their own.

I found that tight fisted-ness was much more common when I went on holiday to Scotland. In the 2 fish and chip shops near where I live,sachets of sauce are free,and you get a generous serving of chips,so much so that a 'small' portion is really enough for 2 people. In Scotland,however,I was gob-smacked at how piddly the portions of chips were. I actually counted them in one portion. Twelve! Unbelievable. It was the same story in all 3 of the chippies that we visited during our fortnight there. And they charged for sachets of sauce!

Do the shops get given the sauce for free? Or just you expecting them to cover the cost?

Who cares about sauce when you can have mushy peas?