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.

Hi, just want to give OLIO a shout out. I volunteer for them, I basically collect waste food from supermarkets and give it out for free to requesters. have a look, it's a free app.
You really do never have to buy bread again!

I know most of you probably already are
not having coffees out, but i saw a video the other day and thought it might be worth sharing.

if you love ice coffee, an easy and cheap swap out is to buy a big jar of instant coffee, empty it all into a bowl.
Add about 1 1/2 cups boiling water to it and dissolve it all.

Pour the concentrated liquid back into the jar and refrigerate it. Keep it there.

when you want an iced coffee, fill a glass up with ice, and cold water and add a teaspoon or two of the concentrated coffee liquid.
Add your milk etc and that jar will do you for the whole summer.

It's so depressing, isn't it? I haven't read the entire thread so apologies if I am repeating what someone else has already said, but I use the 'Too Good to Go' app practically every day and collect bags of groceries and baked goods that are just past their sell by date and are perfectly okay to eat or freeze, just not okay to sell. Each bag is about £3.50–£5.00 depending on where you are in the country and although you don't know what you're going to get, they regularly contain fruit, veggies, salad, snacks, cheese, sandwich meats, baked goods, pizzas, and a loaf of bread.

I also batch cook and make most meals from scratch which I pad with lentils, chickpeas, butter beans, chickpeas, black beans, kidney beans, and as much veg as possible. It's great to have ready meals in the freezer, but it's still not easy. I'm much more thoughtful about what I'm picking up these days. I tend to buy pork and beef mince rather than beef mince which is basically £10 a pack nowadays, and I take advantage of the reduced aisle as well as doing most of my shopping at ALDI.

It's a bloody nightmare though, isn't it? Doesn't seem to matter what I do in terms of savings, it isn't good enough and it's bloody hard work to keep three starving teenagers full all day—especially when they seem to need 5,000 meals every 24 hours. I never wanted to leave the EU anyway, but life before Brexit seems like a bloody ray of sunshine now.

It's because they are crappy quality to begin with, yet stupidly expensive. We used to have an allotment, but we are also time poor, and a bad summer forecast or evil slugs could ruin batches and batches of hard work. It was soul destroying. Something had to give, especially since the price of renting that went up too.

Everything became scarce and expensive during the pandemic and it's never gone back because we paid it then and pay it now. Packages have shrunk as well.

I use apps such as “too good to go” and l, a facility called “that bread and butter thing” (nationwide initiative) to get very low
cost food and an app called olio to get free food in my local area. These are not foodbanks, they are open to everyone, all
you need to do is join and choose what you would like. Then i use what i get to plan my week and top up shop where needed to make full meals. I spend about £35 a week to feed myself and two kids and additional for pet food but I also feed myself dog veg etc that I get from the methods mentioned.

Prohibitively expensive... My shopping used to be £120 - 160 max per week. There was meat for each day, lots if fruit, onions, carrots and the rest of veg was frozen. 7 jars of dolmio, swiss muesli, lots of eggs, extra virgin olive oil, flour, yeast, sugar, dried fruit, nuts,loads of milk, butter 500g, nappies, wipes, toilet rolls were a must every week. This with chocolates ir some unexpected purchases were £160 in 2019. Today I shop almost identical items fir 320 - 400 easily... Used to pay 130 for 500 litres of heating oil, now I pay 360... The only way I'm breaking even is that both me and Hubby skip breakfast and lunch quite often, try to buy from Iceland, I can only afford apples and pears, carrots, onions and celery. We only use 1 car everything else is adone by walking up to 7 miles return journey, can't take busses, hate them.

The government is apparently asking supermarkets to price cap basics but sounds like they're resisting. I recall Rishi Sunak trying similar a few years ago but not getting very far: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c5y7qz806q3o

7 jars of dolmio in a week? How many people are you feeding? I never buy ready made sauces so not sure how many they feed.

You spend £400 a week on food? And 7 jars of jarred sauce a week? Why not bulk make your own for much cheaper?

You have to make sure you select groceries rather than bakery or in-supermarket cafes. Some are much better than others. I have been particularly impressed with the supermarkets connected to petrol stations. I've had four bags this week.

If you don’t want fancy whitening etc, this is decent. Not as strong mint which I find more pleasant and fluoride in
superdrug is also worth a look with their card offers, I stocked up on a lot of stuff and saved a decent amount of money
This bath/shower soak is £2 with their card, 500ml and really lovely as a treat
https://www.superdrug.com/toiletries/washing-bathing/shower-gels-body-wash/superdrug-vitamin-e-almond-showergel-bath-soak-500ml/p/833984

i am pretty good with beauty products for less so if anyone is wanting something then I can try and help!

I’m not sure why the mention of potato peel soup is attracting derision and I’m going to give it a go just to see what it tastes like. If we eat baked potato’s which includes the peel then why not eat the peel in soup?

Hiya- we do still have it but now most every meal is based around it which we used to do. This week’s meal plan for example I have sausages as I made mash and froze it last week as I had bought the 19p potatoes when on offer. But things like steak whilst always.a treat anyway just seem too ridiculously priced to add to my shop although I sometimes get the thin steaks and we will have steak baguettes. We also get a lot of Basa as that’s cheap, and king prawns, gammon every couple of weeks. Last night we had beef and chickpea chilli
Weirdly he will happily eat pot noodles or pasta in sauce most days for work but when it comes to evening meals he notices the lack of meat although to be fair to him he hasn’t commented lately as he has realised the price of things too

I get myself a couple of Aldi protein shakes a week to top myself up- I started drinking them when I was intentionally losing weight last year- £2 a week I can justify

If I'm making soup with potatoes in it at all I leave the peel on, so potato peel soup sounds like a fairly normal thing.

I grew up with older, Yorkshire, grandparents who made everything from scratch and wasted nothing. It's ingrained in me, and I've never been more thankful for that education than I am these days.

Not this government’s fault Brexit was in the Conservatives one This one is trying to repair the damage of the 10 previous years

I realise this comment was way back in the thread but I must protest about Op citing public sector pay as a reason food cost increases. Since 2008 many sectors including NHS, have had equivalent pay cuts of up to 20% when factoring in inflation. During the austerity government 7 years of pay freeze with max 1% increases. I can’t see what food costs have to do with them. Recent increases were desperately needed.

I live in my overdraft

Quite. Some public sector workers are getting their first meaningful pay rise since 2010. And they don't have access to special shops where prices are kept artificially low.

"Stepping in" how?

Don’t worry as Starmer is furiously brown nosing Macron as we speak.

Its such a stupid idea: cost of production going up,so they'll just screw the farmers, many of who are working at a loss already. That's before you even lob in Inheritance tax. And cost of diseal and fertiliser not even fully hitting yet. But today, government decided we don't actually care about Russia's war of aggression, so easing sanctions to get refined products from India made with Russian oil

One time I got an Aldi one and not joking it was 22 bags of salad that had already gone brown, a bag of casserole veg and a bag of cauli and broccoli that was also turning brown. The only thing that was easily edible was an apple and strawberry pot that my daughter claimed. I kept the casserole veg and the broccoli and cauliflower but the rest there was no way I could get through without making myself ill or having to buy extra ingredients to make e.g a pesto and so I donated it to my friend who has guinea pigs and rabbits
Its in the terms an conditions that it can contain duplicates but this was to the extreme and I think realistically it should have gone in their skip and not my order and they should have cancelled as having no surplus
I have had a Starbucks one as well where the contents only had a full price value of £8 and not the £15 promised so I complained and was refunded as a credit- ironically it was that credit that I used to order the Aldi one 🤦‍♀️
I have had some really good ones as well- especially Carvery ones or Yo Sushi but I definitely don’t use it as much as I used to

What we do now is go to the market and get £120 “deal” which fills the chest freezer. Then our shops are just fruit veg and store cupboard stuff, which is much less expensive.

BUT this only works because we can afford the meat up front and we have space for a chest freezer (never had space when I was younger) and we have a car to drive to bury market and bring all the meat back.

So it’s one of them where being poor is expensive.

So they are shoplifting things that they want, not things they need and think its justified. Its not.