To have already noticed prices rising?

[Destinysdaughter]

It's just a few things but since Xmas I've started to notice certain things costing more, some examples, I was given a nice bottle of wine from M&S which was £13, it's now £14. Also Body shop Chamomile cleansing oil was £10, is now £12 ( tho got it with a 40%off code)

Is this the start of the cost of living rising or are these isolated incidents?

Thing is though...food and clothing, and lots of other things have been insanely cheap for years. I was reading Adrian Mole the other day (found it in an old box of books) It was written in 1982. There is a list of all the clothes he will need for school, and for the most part you could get clothes in supermarkets or Primark in 2017 for roughly the same prices.
Same with food. Meat and fish were very expensive. We rarely had chicken in the early 80s, it cost a lot. You didn't get 6 Easter eggs because they were expensive, not 3 for 4 quid or whatever.
Yes, it's tough on those of us who spend a greater proportion of their income on food, but really we should be asking ourselves who has been paying if we could manage to import food and clothes this cheaply?

So another example, Asda's ricotta cheese was £1, today was £1.20. That's a big difference!

Don't want to be controversial, but if this is due to Brexit, I'm really fucking pissed off!

I did a supermarket order the other day but didn't book a slot. Logged in today to book a slot and complete checkout and the box of own-brand fish fingers in my basket - always normally £3.25 - was suddenly £4.25! That's quite some inflation there

I'm really afraid that things are going to get very expensive in the coming few years - we don't have much wiggle room in our budget at the moment.

Food prices have been creeping up a lot - I noticed a couple of years ago that a shopping basket that used to cost me £100 was getting to be close on £150ish on a regular basis - and we changed a lot of what we ate accordingly to bring it down (lots of pulses, mince, fish fingers etc. instead of more expensive meat and fresh fish). Now even that shop is leaping up! We still eat healthily, but this time it looks like it's the basics - butter, veg etc. that are leaping up in price, which is worrying because then it's a lot harder to eat well and healthily without spending a lot of money.

As ever, it's a different food economy now - lots of posters on mumsnet are dreadfully fond of saying that it's really cheap if you cook from scratch and use local in season veg blah blah. It hasn't been that way for years. Processed ready meals are cheap as chips. Fruit, veg, basics, however, are the expensive stuff (and these are going to get a lot more expensive after Brexit with the double whammy of import costs on European-grown produce and dairy, and rising labour costs as we can't bring in cheaper seasonal labour for agriculture and farming).

Yes when basics are more expensive but ready meals are not, it's not going to help pp be healthy and lose weight.

Just got home after my weekly Aldi shop which has been roughly between £60 and £80 for about a year. In the last month it has been nearer £90-£105. The manager was on my checkout this evening and I asked him if prices are rising (yes) and was it due to Brexit (a lot of stuff comes from Spain - good weather for a large part of the year so easier to grow the green stuff etc) and, again (yes).

Prices are also affected by price of oil, which is going up at the moment. But the hike in food prices was predicted by Project Fear, otherwise known as Remain, or Project Reality. And yes, it has only just started. The only way to stop this is for leavers to tell their MP they have changed their mind. Otherwise we are all going to have to go through this pain for quite a few years whilst Mrs May goes visiting Saudi Arabia and Russia and other dubious places in order to desperately try to replace the fabulous trade deals we have in place now as part of the EU. But hey-ho - getting back control and all that

The only way to stop this is for leavers to tell their MP they have changed their mind.

You do realise we have not left the EU yet do you?? Do you think the price increase may have something to do with last months budget? Or are you completely dim??

You do realise we have not left the EU yet do you?

But even the threat of leaving the EU has caused our currency to massively devalue and inflation to increase. Or are you completely dim?

The thing about the food prices is that it's not necessarily a bad thing. The prices we paid before were the result of a strong pound and reflected a distorted currency rather than the value of the product. We might pay a higher price, but it will reflect the transport, labour and wages paid to produce the product. And it may well start letting British produced workers, food and goods fight their corner against goods which were imported because they were cheaper to produce because of currency distortion. Perhaps we will have to learn to buy seasonal local goods again. But for one I'm not going to be crying into my San Pellegrino because I'm sad I might be eating potatoes instead 'vibrant salads' as another poster has done recently.

We don't even eat fucking potatoes. We eat salads, organic meat, organic dairy, and fruit and veg mostly. Make fun of "vibrant" salads all you want - some of us don't want to eat other foods.

I don't want to live in a country where the divide between rich and poor is ever increasing even worse than it is now.

As an individual family, We will be fine - we can absorb price increases but other families can't and more families and therefore children will be thrown into childhood poverty. Fuck it, I don't want to pay 47% taxes to line the pockets of the rich all the while watching those in need grow ever worse and worse off, especially disabled people, the elderly and children. They will pay the heaviest price.

Ah. So paying £20 more a week for food is some dreadful sort of red line between the rich and poor. But paying hundreds of pounds a month more in housing costs because of a housing crisis and a stagnation of wages particularly amongst the worst paid because of an unsustainably growing population isn't something to worry about. Right.

But hey, who cares about housing and wages. As long as you can eat your salad and dress it up as caring about the poor then who gives a fuck about far worse problems like actually having a roof over your head.

Didn't a French Queen say that once? 'Let them eat vibrant salad'?

Oh lovely. "Dress it up as caring about the poor" I don't want to live in a country with rampant poverty - it's self- interest as much as care about others. Poverty isn't good for anyone. It makes for a shit country.

It isn't faux caring - poverty in the U.K. Isn't necessary.

Oh yes, I'm such a French Queen. Oh la la la. As if.

Cakes - We have just had a budget. You know the yearly event when the Political Party in power place tax and price increases on just about everything. You know the one I mean?

Have you not noticed that we have a budget around March and prices are hiked around April - EVERY YEAR! Or have you only noticed this year so you can blame Brexit - which hasn't happened yet s is not likely to for some time....

Prices rise every year, you'll never stop that and yes alot of people saying its down to Brexit because the pound dropped.

But its been way lower than this in the past 12 years. It totally tanked in Dec 2008 went right down to 1.02 (It was at 1.48 in 2007) but no one was screaming about price rises then. Its actually at the same rate now that it was throughout most of 2009 and 2010.

Not unreasonable OP, not at all.

Why, only the other day I bought a 1st class stamp, expecting to be charged the 4 1/2p it was in 1974, only to find that because we'd joined the Common Market in 1973, we'd had to bring in something call Value Added Tax to pay for the Common Market.

This VAT (which had started at 8%) has since driven inflation to such an extent, that prices have shot up.

I'll be writing to my MP as soon as we leave the Common Market to demand the abolition of VAT and look forward to not having to pay £2 every time I spend a tenner so those nice commisoners in the EC can have massive salries, villas, chaffeur-driven cars, huge pensions, free flights etc. etc.

HTH (oh and well done for posting in AIBU?)

Perfectly possible and easy to grow your own 'vibrant salads' for next to nothing if they get too expensive.

Oh, it is also worth bearing in mind the recent weather crisis that severely impacted Mediterranean salad growers. Basic economics dictates supply and demand based pricing under those kind of unexpected shortages, so that will have undoubtedly had a knock on effect in the 'vibrant salad' department.

Food was always too cheap in the UK. For example I would often buy and send nuts, rice etc from here to family in India because it was 30 per cent cheaper here. Things are now levelling off to where they should be.

Basic economics dictates supply and demand based pricing under those kind of unexpected shortages, so that will have undoubtedly had a knock on effect in the 'vibrant salad' department.

Most large buyers will hedge the risk on their commodities to mitigate the volatility- agricultural commodities are sometimes hedged as high as 90%. Futures markets make "basic economics" quite complex. It isn't as simple as supply and demand.

Interesting chart showing the increasing CPI - see the food data

www.ons.gov.uk/chartimage?uri=/economy/inflationandpriceindices/bulletins/consumerpriceinflation/feb2017/24ce2628

vibrant salad

The £ is low and inflation is rising.

Might also be worth getting used to seasonal food. Lettuce and tomato in April means lots of greenhouses and food miles. Two fingers up to the next generation.

I cba doing the searches, and I have no agenda so not sure what to compare, but if you got to www.mysupermarket.co.uk/ you can see a graph at the bottom of each item (you have to scroll right down) that shows price variations for that product.

Tesco's Bistro salad, which I guess is vibrant, hasn't changed over the last twelve months, but the size may have altered.

I have found prices creeping up, but that's to be expected for all sorts of reasons, like climate change, food security, soil degradation etc etc etc

Coop bagels are up from £1 to £1:35.

I went to Lidl this week. Other supermarkets are bloody ridiculous

seasonal local produce blah blah

You miss the point though: leaving the EU will ensure that imported produce gets more expensive and "seasonal local produce" gets even more expensive too. At the moment imported food is often cheaper than locally grown (e.g. strawberries from Spain): but tariffs going up on those isn't going to make local produce cheaper or more affordable - mainly because our local agricultural industries rely on seasonal imported EU labour to keep costs down.

No more strawberries from Spain because of Brexit doesn't mean cheaper strawberries from Kent. It means we can't afford strawberries from Spain but farmers also go bust in Kent. And it's la-la land to talk of us all growing our own - most young people haven't the land or the time to be growing heaps of food in their back garden. (Most 30-something professionals I know live in flats as they can't even afford houses.)

And don't get me started on the delusion of elderly Brexiteers thinking that young jobless British people are going to be picking all the strawberries (we have one of the lowest youth unemployment rates in the West and it's a total Daily Mail fantasy that there is some kind of army of the jobless waiting to snap up all the jobs when Polish workers go home).

Most large buyers will hedge the risk on their commodities to mitigate the volatility- agricultural commodities are sometimes hedged as high as 90%. Futures markets make "basic economics" quite complex. It isn't as simple as supply and demand.

^^This.

Most middle-aged and elderly Brexiters - in fact most people in this country - have a very very simplistic and largely falsified understanding of markets and economics, which assumes a very simplistic idea of supply and demand that just isn't true of nearly any macroeconomic market, from housing prices to retail economics. It's just wishful thinking to fall prey to some of these delusions about "basic economics" and the strong pound vs import prices and so on. In reality it is much more complex than that, and currency fluctuations have different kinds of impacts on commodity prices than most people think. One reason for the lack of immediate impact on food prices after Brexit is that since most commodities are hedged in tranches of futures contracts, food price inflation normally shows up irregularly, and some time in the future from the actual change in currency values. It's creeping in now, but the real impact of the post-Brexit movements in the pound has only just started to emerge.