If you have been disappointed by Quality Street or Roses this Christmas

[TheDowagerCountessofPembroke]

Can I recommend M&S Big Mix. Nice thick chocolate, shiny wrappers, toffees that will take out your fillings, coffee creams.

Mmm. Not sure how true that is

Whilst they were definitely more expensive they weren't more expensive than meat (equivalent of £24).
I was paid £3.75 an hour as a 14 year old chambermaid in 1985. So I would have been able to buy a tub after hour and a half work.

Given the price of other things people see as treats a £10 tub of half decent chocolates would be fine.

It is true. I worked it out myself using the information from and old Woolworths advert.

My husband bought a tub of quality street and the shitty bland matte wrappers put me off. A very sad state of affairs now.

The maths behind it.

This Woolworths advert from 1983 shows a 3lb jar costing £4.99.
3lb is 1.3kg.
The plastic tub this year was 600g, so slightly less than half the size. It was on sale at £6/5 this year.

According to an inflation calculator £5 in 1983 is worth £21 today.

@TheDowagerCountessofPembroke I know the maths but I lived through it.
The inflation calculator doesn't reflect how people actually bought things differently back then.
I genuinely got paid £3.75ph as a teenager and therefore could afford the chocolates after 2 hours. Min wage now is £6.40ph so relatively less than my wage even though they could buy 3 or 4 tubs on two hours wage

How could you buy 3 or 4 tubs at £5 after 2 hours at £6.40?

Oh weren't they just ???
Rubbish wrappers..only two toffee pennies and the suipposidly coffee ones tasted of hardly anything.
Plus the one had been made smaller and rounded down to a small farty little thing.
Thanks for the tip on the M&S chocs

asked oh to grab a tub of something for our Christmas holiday away from Tesco. He got Heroes as they were the handiest but when we opened the nasty plastic tub there were so few in there you could see the bottom of the tub before eating them! chocolate on them was not impressive seemed a lot of Bounty and only one Malteser. Thought due to the downhill slide of the Roses and QS we were going to be better off, do not say to buy them at all

Agree OP!

I picked up a box of the M&S Big Mix for the first time this year to check the choices inside, and was chuffed to see there's no horrible coconut one, none of us like it. We've really enjoyed it and might get another one for Hogmanay.

It feels like much better value than the rubbish plastic tins, which I haven't bought for a couple of years as they got so bad. Nice to have a decent alternative to share round.

(I also get v posh chocs from DH every year but they are MINE and not for sharing! )

I spat out a QS toffee penny yesterday. It tasted like MEAT 😖

If you got paid £3.75 ph as a teenager in 1985 that was relatively well paid, are you sure that was correct?

NMW was introduced in the late 1990s and started at £3.60 an hour - at the time many people were only earning £1 or £2 ph.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-48445674#:~:text=The%20National%20Minimum%20Wage%20came,those%20aged%2018%20to%2021.

(NMW now is £11.44, rising to £12.21 in April, not £6.40, so you might want to reconsider your point). Chocolates and most other treat foods are hugely cheaper than they used to be and people consume far far more - I'm a similar age to you and we had hardly chocolates etc day to day, once a week at most.

We were bought the big QS tin at Christmas by our grandparents and it was a huge treat, we never saw that amount of sweets the rest of the year.

I did look up the average wage in both 1983 and today. In 1983 the average weekly wage was £154. If you work that out to an hourly rate it’s £3.85.
Today the average weekly wage is £667, that’s £16.67 an hour.

The NMW wasn't meant to be a living wage though. It was just to stop the ad hoc paying people cash/ dodgy wages/ slave labour that was rife.

The thing about inflation is that it doesn't reflect actual life standards. I totally agree that sweets and chocolates were a treat but shopping full stop was different. They were party foods. It wasn't even the price but just not done. Same as how we view wine or meal deals ( not invented - no chocolate bar as part of an everyday lunch).

Money was spent differently. No phone/ broadband ( essential nowadays) or TV/ streaming subscriptions.

The reason Roses and Quality Street are shit is because people will still buy crap chocolates just because.

Quality Street! What happened to ‘The Purple One’. It’s no longer the right shape! Also the wrappers are crap. I don’t care about the environment, I want the shiny wrappers! 😉

Yes! I’m so glad I saw this as I have given this so much thought over Christmas!
My friend bought me a box of m and s Big Mix and we loved them. I thought they were much better than Quality Street. I have only just today had a long and detailed conversation with my aunt about this very matter.
I was even considering a trip to M and S for some more but then I remembered that I need to lose a stone ☹️

My quality streets were awful this year.

The strangest was one in purple wrapper which was shaped like a whirl but with the nut inside and strawberry flavouring. What the actual fuck???

We just don’t buy them any more. 3-4 big handfuls of sweets in a ‘tub’ and they don’t even taste like real chocolate.

The toffee penny used to be my least favourite. Now it's the one I eat most as it's the only one that tastes the same as it always did. The quality of the others has gone so far down hill as to be completely unrecognisable. The expensive cocoa solids have been almost completely replaced by cheap sugar so none of the chocolate tastes of chocolate - or anything - any more. The inside of the chocolate is also mostly sugar making them all disgustingly sickly sweet.

I didn't buy any this year after being so disappointed the last few years, but my parents had some and it reminded me how glad I was that I hadn't wasted my money.

Roses were awful this year, none of them had any centres and the chocolate was horrible. I'll remember these for next year. Thanks.

They were awful. Regrettably it did not stop me eating the little bastards in their miserable jackets.

I'm still grieving the lack of butterscotch in the Black Magic box and Lime Barrel in the Terry's All Gold. Nothing is any good anymore. 😢

Until people stop buying them, the companies will continue to produce both inferior chocolates and reduce the quantity.
I saw a post on Instagram- one family keeping a record for 20 years of one of the tubs. In 2004 they got 130+ chocolates. This year, they got 67. Obviously smaller tub, maybe cheaper in terms of inflation, but still a swizz when you expect the old version.
We bought none of them this year. They're all crap.

I went to John Lewis for the QS pick and mix as I only like a few of them - most of them were out of stock when I went, and I ended up with a lot of Toffee Pennies. Usually like these but I think they’ve changed the recipe as they tasted vile this year.

I actually bought an old vintage tin off eBay and some coloured cellophane squares with a late night (probably after some wine) notion of rewrapping them, and springing the 'rustley bustley' old fashioned tin full of shiny sweets out as a surprise on Christmas Eve, like the retro pictures of them going about online. Reality is I wrapped about 10 (very badly) before getting bored and now have a lot of cellophane squares and 'quality' street. Madness.