Just had to put a food shop on the credit card, fed up!

[whatsausername]

We don’t get paid until next Thursday. I’d ran out of essentials like coffee, hand wash, toothpaste, chips etc. Needed the usual packed lunch stuff too. £78 in Asda. I have £82 in the account until payday but need to keep it in as direct debits due day before payday.

I just feel bleugh. We both work full time and having to put a weekly food shop on a credit card is just soul destroying.

anyone else feel like this?

I agree. We've just spent the summer in France and supermarket prices were similar or more expensive than UK. Except of course for wine prices.

£100 for a family of five is brilliant. I was querying why the OP was spending £50 a week on just packed lunches for 3 people. It feels excessive.

It's total shit op. I can't believe how expensive just day to day living is nowadays. It just makes you think what's the bloody point? You work hard all week and there's no money in the pot for fun stuff (or fun food!). Life is pretty bleak

Agreed. When I spend time in France I find the supermarkets as expensive if not more so than the UK, with the exception of wine. Proper bakery croissants are at least 1euro each. Obviously you can buy the rubbish long life ones cheaper like in the uk.

I agree with coffee being an essential!

Snacks, drinks and pre-prepared food for lunches - always over-priced for what it is! It is one of these things that lots of people buy but still I can’t understand why.
So much cheaper for ex to make your own pasta salad, savoury muffin, veg sticks, cut up fruit etc than to buy ready-made (and full of UPF).
Of course, there is a convenience aspect, but to
pay such a high premium to save 10min!

As a French living in the UK, my conclusion is that in the UK the choice is often between cheap food but with a lower quality or good quality food but very expensive, whereas in France even the lower range (own brand) is of a respectable quality, and then you have a variety of price points if you want something a bit better.

I look at the numbers of people flying abroad on holidays. Not one holiday a year but two or three and am baffled. I'm talking millions of plane seats. There's some decent salaries being paid in some areas of the economy.

No, this is total nonsense. Perhaps read the ONS link I posted. People were not healthier in the twentieth century — rather the complete opposite (all this nostalgia for the past is all rather misplaced). We’ve had processed foods since the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and lots of it to far poorer quality than today. My grandparents certainly didn’t have “real butter”: they used to have Vitalite in a plastic tub. From the fifties to the nineties they ate Spam, potted meat spread (made of meat slurry by-products of the industrial meat industry), tinned pies, lard, tinned veg, crab sticks, crisps, biscuits, processed cakes. My grandmother used National Dried milk, powdered egg and Smash instant potato. Remember the meat processing scandals around battery farming, BSE, horse meat in processed food, meat by-products made of skin and tendon? Why do you think that happened? Because many foods were produced cheaply on an industrial scale without much oversight and contained all sorts of additives, fats, bits of animals and things you wouldn’t want to think about.

We have far better food quality control and knowledge about how our food is produced than in either 1970 or 1990. That doesn’t mean people necessarily eat better - that’s very different. But the idea that people ate like an Enid Blyton novel in the twentieth century is a complete fallacy.

You will with Dove. I don’t class that at proper bar soap as nice as it is. My dd goes through a bar every couple of weeks.

as for the Aldi body wash lasting six months, try as I might there’s no way I can make that last six months and that’s putting a tiny squeeze on to a flannel (when I was using it)

I use Bar soap, imperial leather, Palmolive, I shower or bath once or twice a day and one bar of Palmolive has lasted me 3 months so far.

But i think the real point is people should be able to have coffee and soap of their choosing on 2 wages, it's not a massive luxury and it's something that lasts multiple uses. I also don't understand all the posters who keep saying 'oh you cant possibly spend that little on your shopping its not possible!' If you have no more money you have to make it possible especially people who have no access to credit, if all they have is £75 it's all they have.

@greengagesummers as someone born in 61 I can assure you I was not eating home baked bread - I ate enough sliced crap and findus crispy pancakes, vesta chow meins and tinned fruit and evaporated milk to sink a boat

I am constantly amazed on threads like this one at how people completely underestimate how much things cost, even when they are buying them!
It's the same with threads evangelising about cooking from scratch when posters talk about ingredients 'only costing pennies' when the reality is somewhat different. An egg costs 23p nowadays!
My dh has started a new job this week which requires him to take packed lunches and snacks.
I have bought: 2 packs of ham @ £5.50 for the two
10 rolls @ £2.60
Cheese slices @ 2.50
5 bags of crisps @ £1.50
6 apples @ £2.40
5 cereal bars @ £1.50
5 bananas @ 75p
Butter, pickle and salad i can't work out as we have them in ATM

So £16.75 for lunches for the week, with probably a few cheese slices left over.

Now I KNOW I could do it cheaper, but as pps said, that's not really the point of the thread. With two working partners, a decent packed lunch should be well within budget.

On my figures, that would cost around £40 if there was four of us because he woukd take two rolls whereas I would only take one plus there would be some economies of scale.

But it's not that much if a push to see how the op's shopping could get to £78 for packed lunches and bits for four.

@greengagesummers oops - that was meant for the poster you were responding too - totally agree with you -

Nope don't believe it. Not for four people

There’s no way a healthy lunch can be made for 4 people for 7 days for £15!

It costs more than that for 2 adults and 1 child here for lunches and we grow a huge amount ourselves in summer.
We have homegrown salads and soups most days, but I still can’t magic up flour, cheese, butter, and many other things we don’t grow.

I make most things at home, and we don’t eat much upf, no alcohol etc

1 loaf of bread isn’t going to cover 21 meals

We are in another European country, and it’s around 30% higher food costs than Uk still, even with uk increases. Wages aren’t higher either

It’s on a budget. We only eat meat 2 nights a week and there’s a lot of bulked out meals with lentils/beans.

Where the fuck are you getting a full shop for £78? Even shopping in Lidl, a top up of essentials can easily reach £100.

Probably lives on homemade bread and water.

Aldi. What exactly do you think people who don't have £500+ a month left from their wages do? Starve? Or do they spend what they can afford, budget well and meal plan?

Or maybe some of us are just better at budgeting than you. Do you think everybody has hundreds and hundreds for their monthly food budget?

I would hardly call a cheese /ham sandwich crisis fruit yog a bad lunch which means will be obese if eating it daily

£50 on lunch stuff seems a lot

I don’t drink coffee but like tea so get its an essential - equally many of my friends say how lovely my coffee is that I get people

it’s Aldi own for think 1.89 but I pour it into a posh coffee jar 😂😂

maybe do the taste test challenge @whatsausername

do you know your coffee 😂

Not being funny but yes I think they starve. Food banks are absolutely overrun. Poverty is rife. The whole point of this thread is that a basic shop is unaffordable to many and they need to either go into debt or do without the essentials. No one is feeding a family for that money and nor should they have to when both work full time.

And if you were there in November-January the same fruit and veg would be vastly more expensive than in the UK.

UK supermarkets massage out a lot of seasonal variation in food prices because that is what British consumers respond want to buy (as a cohort, I’m sure on MN everyone only ever wants local, seasonal, hand reared food 🙄).
That means food in season is more expensive than in eg France, food out of season is cheaper.

Most European markets expect seasonal variation in prices and so that is what they get from their supermarket chains.

This model existed long before Brexit and has nothing to do with it.

I feed my family for £75 a week, so yes it's possible. There isn't a magical cut off between people at food banks and suddenly the rest have plenty of money for food shopping. There's a huge middle ground of people that cut their cloth, they're not in poverty but don't have £150 a week to spend at the supermarket.

The food shop the OP has done has put her into debt, as is the case for a lot of people, but you can't judge an entire budget by that. Perhaps she, or others, spend a lot on other things that we'd deem luxuries? My brother spends a fortune on hobbies that are "essential for his mental health" and then whinges he has no money left. People pay £60 a month for a phone contract, £100 on a family meal out at the weekend. "I work full time so should be able to afford what I want" isn't the flex people think it is if they're not working to their actual budget for everything else.

Two things can be simultaneously true.

It is true that the shitstorms of the past years have made cost of living awful. Shrinkflation, food prices, utilities - all of it.

It is also true that corners could be cut in what some people describe. We are two adults and 2 DC. Dogs have seperate budget. We rotate proteins daily between fish, eggs, paneer/quorn and chicken. We find this is fairly cheap on Tesco.Our dinners next week involve -

1. Own brand Salmon half a kilo £5.70 (Salmon and broccoli spaghetti)
2. Own brand Salmon half a kilo £5.70 (Salmon in sweet chillies with mash)
3. Tesco chicken mince 500 gm 2.50 (Keema curry with Growers harvest frozen veg which is £1 for 1 kilo)
4. Tesco chicken mince again 500 gm £2.50 (Stir fried with green beans and soy with spaghetti)
5. Tesco chicken drum fillets 600 gms £2.99 (chicken curry and rice)
6. Tesco chicken drum fillets 600 gms again £2.99 (chicken casserole)
7. Egg curry (eggs £2.15 for 12 I think)
8. Paneer (£1.50 for a block) and chickpea stir fry with rice
9. Whole roast chicken (£3.95) with potatoes and veg

That is all weekend meals and all weeknight dinners for under £30 for the week worth proteins for all 4 of us - obviously needs home cooking from scratch.

Lots of Hearty Food company spaghetti (28 p), rice (under £1), large bag potatoes (£1.80), Growers harvest frozen veg (£1 for a kilo) and frozen mushrooms (£1), peppers (£1), beans (£1), broccoli (£1.10) carrots (£1). Canned tomatoes and chickpeas and Creamfields cheddar and yoghurt also cheap. We add grapes, oranges, milk.

The extras are waffles, or cheese snacks for the kids.

Higher welfare or organic is obviously higher in price -but we don't do that in our budget.

Our Tesco weekly shops routinely come to £75-80 for all 4 of us. Pet budget for pet food is seperate. We also set aside £40 a month for any home and garden type spends which could be large laundry liquid and compost and toilet roll mass delivery or whatever.