product prices and you just thought.....

[tanoshi]

I was supermarket shopping today and went to pick up a product I always buy to discover it has increased in price by a ridiculous amount and I just thought.
Nah. It can stay there. This list is now growing. Anyone else deciding to just leave products on the shelf because they're not worth the money anymore?
I did it in Costa. I went in for a cappuccino and thought Nah! I'm not paying that anymore and walked out.

Jeez!
I went for a carvery with my dad and it was £12 for our two meals as there was an offer on the app
people often slate a carvery but it was hot, tasty and as many Yorkshire puddings as you liked and a good variety of veg

spagbol used to be a cheap meal to make.
Now it’s £5 for a pack of lean mince!

At least spaghetti is still cheap I suppose.

My niece has coeliacs, their food bill is much higher than ours. It’s not fair that gluten free food is so expensive.

Exactly this. Sainsbury's is eye-wateringly expensive. A pack of casserole steak that used to be £5.35 is suddenly £6.35. I left it. We're eating chicken and a lot of eggs and vegetables. I don't understand how inflation is reported as 4% or so and yet the rises I see are often 10 or 20%?

I must check trends in supermarket profits. But I do feel they're gougers.

We were buying organic beef mince which was pricey. £6 for 500g before Xmas. Since Xmas it has gone up weekly and now £8.50. I stopped buying it so we just have lentils now.

Oh I've just checked it's now £9.25 for 500g.

KFC for me. I don’t really eat it as I don’t like it but thought I’d treat the kids to one while we were out. A family bucket now £20-£25 I remember when it use to be £9.99-£15. A burger meal £8/£9 dinner used to be around £5-£6

Also deodorant.
i use dove usually pay around £1.50-£2 for the big one in homebargains. Went to get some more last week and £3.25 for the small bottle. No thanks

Recent rises are likely (partly at least) to be in response to the employers' NI increase. There have been redundancies in the sector as well.

We try to do well out of yellow sticker food, but we've found that the first reduction is often barely anything, so you have to time it right for at least reduction 2, if not 3, to get a significant saving. I'm sure they never used to be so tight with the first cut (Sainsbury's).

I feel deodorant is not something you can opt out of though!

You can swap brand though. I’ve stopped using Dove for this reason and have moved onto something else which is half the price and works.

No you can’t. I just went for the cheaper Vaseline one

“Posh” supermarket own brand pizzas -£6. I made some at home instead.

Even the non posh basic ones are expensive now
Buy reduced baguette and make french bread pizza

Cut in half, scoop the middle out, add tomato paste
Top with whatever you fancy or have in the fridge , mozzarella, olives, ham and bake

For £6 you can make a big batch and freeze them ready to bake

Costa is such a rip off, consider it’s buying power and it sells the tinyest cakes for £3.50, when my local independent cafe sells huge slices, made by his mum, for the same price.

I buy McCain frozen jacket potatoes - pack of 8 is now a pack of 6. Fortunately I’m the only one that eats them but it will be own brand next time!

You can make your own pizza base for pennies. It’s just flour, oll, yeast sachet. Roll them out and bake in oven. Freeze and then you can rebake whenever. A can of chopped tomatoes, stick blender and a pinch of Italian herbs. Ball of mozzarella. Alternatively butter plus garlic purée for garlic pizza bread.. Drizxle of oil and seasoning and have it with soup.

I think the NI increases were significant and are definitely part of it, but they went up once - so why are food prices going up and up and up every single week?

Is it that the NI increases necessitated such huge price rises that they've been/are deliberately implementing them in stages to sugar the pill and avoid riots... or are they just cashing in big time?

And kept you fuller than my measly 1 slice of toast!

Now that I don't know.

There will be other factors, including raw materials, cost of production, the minimum wage increase. I think there's probably a fair amount of financial pressure in the sector.

You may be right that increases have been drip fed, rather than implemented in one go.

Possibly some profiteering alongside (though supermarket profit margins are notoriously tiny - their profits are large due to volume of sales, not profit on each item sold, in the main).

2 vegetarian / vegan breakfasts , 2 teas £36 .
ok very nice riverside cafe in Lake District , but blimey !

Cheaper brands are nowhere near as good as Heinz. You’re deluding yourself if you think that. I won’t set foot in Aldi or Lidl because their food is shit. My sister buys it and I don’t know how she can eat the stuff

I used to buy Fray Bentos steak and kidney pies occasionally. Usually when I was them for £1 each at B&M or Home Bargains. I was in B&M last week and they were £3 each! I did not buy them.

For me it’s chocolate i absolutely refuse to buy twirls they reduced the pack size and increased the price, they’ve just done the same to Freddos. Also £3:45 for a small box of malteasers! I remember buying those as an add on gift for a kids party.

Tesco really annoy me when they increase prices to then put the product on special offer a few weeks later.

I suppose this underhand tactic must work for them; but I don't see how.

Fair enough if it's something like DFS, where you maybe get a new sofa every however many years and don't usually need one urgently - so they can pick a quieter month to offer them at the 'full' price and then heavily 'reduce' them ready for when people are actually buying.

But when it's food and household products that people need every week? Putting out a ridiculous 'behave yourself' price just makes you look like a very expensive place to shop, so people may respond by looking elsewhere for a cheaper shop and abandoning you for good when they find one.

And when you put the price back down again (with however much fanfare), it's just returned to the normal price - obviously not an actual bargain - so it's unlikely to get customers excited at all and view you as a good value shop, if they even register that they're supposed to think that they're getting a great price.

This is one of the advantages of Home Bargains and their ilk - obviously their prices have to change sometimes (upwards, most likely), but they don't tend to use underhand tactics like this.

We recently spent a couple of days in the Yorkshire Dales, where there are masses of sheep just about everywhere you look, and as usual, it made me wonder why U.K. lamb is so expensive. I’m all for farmers getting a fair price, I know it’s hard work, and I wouldn’t want to do it, but….

Should add, that someone local told me that there had generally been a good lambing season, but because of the lack of rain, there wasn’t enough grass for them to eat.

Everywhere was very lush and green by the time we were there, though.