How do you cope with supermarket prices going up and up and up?

[WildEnergySupplier]

Just back from my big supermarket shop and I’m genuinely shocked at how much prices have gone up AGAIN.

It feels like every week there’s another increase - milk, bread, meat, vegetables, even the own-brand basics that used to be affordable. Things that were £2 to £2.50 about 4-5 years ago are now all about £4 to £4.50. It feels like since last summer, the prices have exploded.

I’m really struggling to keep the weekly food bill under control while everything else (energy, petrol, council tax etc etc) is still sky high.

This is despite the government telling us last week how brilliantly the economy is doing!! It certainly doesn’t feel like it to me. And I just heard on the radio that this navel gazing by-election is apparently costing us £5 million, as it will lead to another mayor election.

So many families are worrying about feeding their kids properly and keeping the heating on. How are the rest of you managing? Any clever tips for cutting costs without it feeling miserable? Are your shops coming in much more expensive too? I’d really appreciate hearing how others are coping because I’m starting to feel a bit despairing about it all. Thanks in advance.

👏

Also debt is a vortex. Once it starts to suck you in and you can’t pay off the charges you accumulate more charges and it sucks you in deeper.

I totally agree. Sometimes I add some curry powder and serve with a dollop of natural yogurt or creme fraiche and flatbreads to dunk 😋

I remember… when my Nan would scurry off to market with an array of butcher stalls and check out what was a good buy that day. Her favourite was belly pork, when cooking it swelled, we had it with huge chips and spring greens, stewed apple, a feast.
Shin beef, slow cooked, tender, a casserole fed us well with carrots, butter beans she soaked and cooked, slices of potato which were incredibly cheap then - middle neck of lamb in a hotpot with pearl barley, liver and onion, lamb cutlets! ham hock for pea and ham soup, a chicken or capon was for high days and holidays, wonderful home made sausage, real meat, herbs and rusk, anything with mince, North Sea fish on Friday, halibut hake cod, plaice, all within reach of the budget of a widow on a pension.
Now we have fish from Thailand, Vietnam, the Med, from farms in Scotland,
chicken from Thailand, Brazil, garlic from China.
British lamb os a terrible price as are any cheaper cuts of meat made popular by Jamie Oliver and others, dried butter beans are hard to find now and I haven’t been able to buy a ham hock in years, a great shame Morrisons stopped selling them.

High cost low quality is what we have now and I’m cynical about free range/organic

soon we will be required to Dig for Victory!

does anyone remember ‘A Private Function’ ?
Maggie Smith laying newspaper on the kitchen floor for the piggy

Precisely.
My adult DCs rarely had snacks, I just couldn’t afford them. They had nutritious, home cooked meals, rarely a fish and chips takeaway.
I worked full time, batch cooked and had to make ends meet however I could. Luckily I could grow fruit, vegetables and rear chickens for eggs.
Interestingly my DCs still have a similar outlook on food and cooking.
I think there’s a total lack of education on cooking from scratch.

I suspect the cheap cuts of meat go somewhere else now, hence my comment about pet food. My understanding is we ship a lot of stuff abroad because we don’t routinely eat it in England.

I don’t eat so much anymore, but always did like fatty cuts of meat and never balked at fat. I think fat got the blame for what sugar did. If food prices remain high and get higher we really are going to have to move away from processed foods and start falling back in love with basic food items.

Absolutely it is - doesn't change the fact tho that it's not rising supermarket prices making that poster's life difficult right now, it's living a long way from work and energy bill debt.

Unfortunately sometimes choices made years earlier (to live in an expensive area that's more remote with poor transport options) come back to bite years later.

For this reason Id always advise my kids to choose to live somewhere when they first start out that is closer to a big town or urban area and better public transport even if that means living in a less 'nice' area. If it gives more flexibility long term to be able to avoid debt then it's worth it. When looking for my first place to live when I got my first proper job I literally discounted anything that wasn't on bus routes. That meant I ended up with a less nice flat in a slightly run down area but it gave me a lot more options when I needed to change job as being on bus routes opened up lots of different areas to look for work when I lost my job.

Because yes I had to survive on hardly any money and cutback a lot, for a period of time. I'm not speaking with no experience of this, I got rid of the £30 a month phone contract and switched to the cheapest basic handset I could find and a £5 a month sim, I cut my food shop right back to essentials only, I avoided stuff that needed cooking in the oven as it uses so much electricity. I bought no clothes and at one point superglued the heel back onto my only pair of shoes because I couldn't afford new ones.

I agree.

None of these are game changing.
Yes, I can save some tens of pounds, but my bills go up hundreds.

I don’t know what the solution is.

Mackies Traditional! cream of Scotland! regularly on offer, even at WR

You are coming across as very keen to be ‘right’ and I’m not sure why.

I have found that the farm shops don't actually seem expensive now, when compared to the supermarkets, for meat at least. And it's better quality (less added water for example) so it goes further.

But as for an overall solution, aside from there being actual caps on what can be charged, there isn't one. People have to eat so they'll buy food, which means there's a demand and shops will charge for that plus they have to pay higher costs themselves.

Vicious circle.

I don't think @Ihateboris was inviting advice on lifestyle changes.

How are you paying so much for oil? I live in a 3 bed semi and oil costs us about £60 a month and that is having the heating on a lot as I don't like being cold

Iron some lentils?

The thing is, when people are making the choices they made years ago, they were doing so in the circumstances of years ago. Could you have predicted the state of the world today 20 years ago?

Different thing, but we chose our current house because of the local school. Got to school age for our daughter, it's now terrible, we've sent her elsewhere, but moving would cost a lot and there would be very little benefit.

OP may have chosen where to live when working closer. Jobs may have been lost, public transport may have changed. It might be as simple as the fact that 20 years ago when I started driving and looking at moving out, petrol cost less than half what it does now. Wages have NOT gone up in line with that over the years.

Lose one income source, arrears could happen. Then you're in debt, and not through a choice you made.

You just sound very determined that OP made her own situation. There will be some element to it, but a lot of these things these days happen to people. It's not through their own choices.

Same could be said for every other poster on this thread?

People have made plenty of rude comments to me suggesting I 'don't understand' or don't live in the real world - because I suggested a poster spending £240 a month on energy costs and £320 on petrol, and struggling, had scope to make changes. That doesn't make me 'not living in the real world'. You all just don't like what I'm saying.

Fine, you can not like it all you like, but I've managed to climb my way out of stuff like credit card debt and arrears and financial struggle, via 20 years of hard work and being really careful with money, and I know some of my own struggles were definitely partially of my own making. I've learnt from my mistakes.

But yes carry on telling me I don't live in the real world have no idea and just want to be right

I never said anyone's situation is of their own making. Just pointed out someone spending £240 a month on energy and £320 on petrol had scope there to look to save money but was shot down entirely as if these suggestions were crazy. Maybe I'm speaking from experience??

You've also said that she's struggling because she's in debt not because of the cost of living and that she's struggling because of choices made.

We're all talking from experience here, as we all have it.

Hi there - what’s a cash back card pls. I’m curious as we don’t have them where I live.

We are hanging on but my god it's soul destroying. I have no cloth left to cut. What I find hard is we have always lived like this. Budgeting secondhand going without etc I'm just tired of no matter what we earn we always have to live by this mindset. I know that's life for many of us. I know i am still lucky and fortunate in many ways.

Unfortunately Irl I'm surrounded by people that are holidaying to dubai or buying new cars and its just difficult to always be the poor friend or relation. I'd settle for being able to put the heating on with no worries.

We switched our heating off beginning of March and May has been the coldest on record and we are wearing coats in the house

Oil went from £500 for 900litrs to £1100 - in a week

Oil heating is not a fixed price, we pay market price

If you are on oil heating you are usually rural ( I am ) so there is no public transport - Im 8 miles from the train station, there's no buses

Being in NI, our electricity is a lot more expensive , our unit rate for normal tariff is 32p unit. We have EV rate, which is 17p at night, 38p daytime - I get up at 5am to do the washing, put the dishwasher on , put the hot water on

I did in fact change jobs when it was costing me money to work, when they started to charge for car parking and fuel went through the roof, but Im at the end of my working life and just need to tide over till my pension kicks in, not so easy for someone still able to earn

I honestly enjoy adding lentils told to a pot of mince
when making mince‘n’tatties. I started doing it for my cholesterol and even now it’s ok I’ll never go back to my old way of making mince.

Also, Dhal is really nice but Ive eaten it for decades because of where I live and my favourite way of making it is to add coconut milk to it and make sure I don’t on the cumin powder.

I survived on potato peelings soup as a youngster - flavoured with a teaspoon of marmite

plus! how will children ever learn fortitude, being required to wait for anything

Thanks for those delicious ideas