Supermarkets are taking the pi$$

[ButterflyTable]

I can’t believe how expensive food is now especially in the likes of Sainsbury’s for the same product. Total P-take, e.g. Organic Milk Sainsbury’s £2 Aldi £1.79.

Why give us ‘nectar’ prices when they are inflated prices in the first place? £5.50 for a Pizza Express Margherita and £2.75 on Nectar. I think actually it’s the fakery with making us think we are getting a good deal that’s pissing me off.

I went to Aldi today (we don’t have one near us) as I was doing a drop off nearby and the price difference is huge!!

yanbu
I really dislike the 'appification' of services.

to get good prices I need to download an app, register and then scan at every shop.
I'm not a loyal shopper and wiuld prefer the price on the shelf to actually be the price at the till.

Quality of fresh produce is going to vary between chains and shops regionally as it's down to how effective the supply chains are in your local area.

So in some places Tesco will be better at getting produce to shops faster, other places it will be Aldi.

And this whole clubcard/nector card discount thing is, unquestionably, bullshit. It's not about being paranoid or whatever, it's simply unethical to offer lower prices to people who are happy to have their shopping habits scrutinised.

We've had to rely on online deliveries recently so I can't do my usual shop around several places to get best value. Sainsbury's do have stupidly high prices for some things but they also price match with Aldi on several hundred items. Fortunately quite a few of them are things we'd be buying anyway. And Sainsbury's doesn't claim to be a budget supermarket like Aldi.

But maybe we should all be questioning the costs, particularly of things like milk.

The average farmgate price that farmers get is only around 40p / litre for organic milk. And that isn't much more than they get for "regular" milk. Arla (the country's biggest fresh milk supplier) only pays a premium of around 5p a litre for organic.

But I've just checked current prices at a few supermarkets and that 40p / litre becomes anywhere between 88p and £1.80 /litre for organic milk when it's offered to us, depending on brand and the size of the bottle/carton.

And it's not just Sainsbury's - Asda and Tesco are mirroring the Sainsbury's price for some products. Yes there's processing, yes there's transport costs and retail markup but someone in the chain is making a lot of money from consumers and it isn't dairy farmers.

Of course milk is organic.
Organic compounds are derived from or produced by living organisms and have carbon-hydrogen covalent bonds. Inorganic compounds are derived from nonliving components, and generally have ionic bonds, lack carbon-hydrogen bonds, and rarely, if ever, contain any carbon atoms.

I think you’re confusing ‘organic’ with ‘produced to organic standards’

The "big" supermarkets are being very cynical with their discounts if you use your loyalty card. They offer lower prices when you use your loyalty card and then recoup their profit by selling your data on to other businesses who then use it to collect information about you so they can target you with various manipulation techniques. For example, a supermarket like Sainsburys selling your data to Sky means that when you & your family are watching a Sky TV programme, Sky can even make a calculated guess at what your family ate for dinner that evening. They target you with ads that their data analysts have calculated will appeal particularly to your family circumstances, to particular family members, - deduced from your data from the supermarket.

The ads you see will most likely be quite different to those seen by someone in the same street who shops at the same supermarket and who is watching the same programme.

Then there's all that info we give to miscellaneous websites - dieting websites, searches about health info, holidays, cars etc etc that gets sold on. Companies can build up quite comprehensive pictures of us and our lives.

Your data is very valuable to big corporations. You may think it's worth giving it to them for the extra money you save, or you may be more protective of the privacy of you and your family.

@DollyDoofer , the food quality from Lidl is generally better than Aldi and I find both fine. The prices are cheaper than Sainsbury's.
I wouldn't want a coffee when out shopping but it adds to your bill.

I had to go to Sainsbury's last week and the veg I bought did seem fresher than Tesco, but I noticed that the groceries were more expensive. Little differences like 10p an item is noticeable when money is tight.

I’m inclined to agree. Asda is the absolute pits these days! We have 2 near us - one in a naice area and one in a socially deprived area. The naice one is our local but sometimes go to the other one as it’s in a shopping centre and we go to the other shops.

used to say “never going back” about the other one as it was a bit of a dump - litter everywhere (in the shop itself), trolleys chained up and needing a coin, toilets a disaster zone. However over the past few months our local has gone right downhill. The shelf’s are half empty no matter when you go. They’ve stopped the night shift so shelves getting filled as you are trying to shop so big pallets blocking the aisles. No toilet paper in the toilets. Travelator has been getting “maintenance” for about 4 months so going upstairs is a right faff. Hardly any staff on the tills.

I said to DH that it’s just not a pleasant shopping experience any more so have started going to Tesco and Sainsbury’s - although am aware/grateful that we have the funds to do this.

Yes, but Sainsbury's organic milk lasts for ages, whereas when I've purchased Aldi organic milk, it has gone off in just a couple of days (2, to be exact). Aldi is cheaper because many of the items are poor quality -- such as tangerines, salads, and other fresh produce (I have bought many bags of onions and potatoes from Aldi that have had a hidden rotten veg or two that you can't see at time of purchase).

I live in a town that has both, so I regularly shop at both of these shops. I do the bulk of my shop at Aldi, but I do buy specific items only from Sainsbury's as the quality means the higher price is worth it. I think with discount supermarkets you really need to know what is actually worth it or not, as otherwise it's a false economy. You think you are getting a great value, but actually you are getting an inferior product.

What do you mean it’s higher quality? Absolutely not my experience

Well shop somewhere else then.

You pay your money you make your choice , Aldi probably works out cheaper if you’d normally buy branded goods in the other supermarkets and switch to their brands . Personally I don’t like the lack of choice , my meat eating son says the chicken breasts in Aldi are horrible and they sell the only bran flakes in the world that my dustbin husband cannot eat . If you were impressed by the price then shop there .

Yes I possibly am - but I think the pp who said milk is organic was saying there is no difference between ‘ organic milk’ and milk not labelled as organic - in food labelling terms this is incorrect as you say there is a difference in organic standards and standard food production standards (which are very low!)

David from Titford Lane in Prickleton on Sea is refusing to have a club card. His shopping data is more valuable than 30% off all yoghurts and 2 for 1 on tinned soup.
He'll buy one soup and a full price yoghurt to make a stand against large cooperations. Respect where respect is due.

*He caved at 40% off all fish fingers weekend.

Aldi M&S and Sainsbury’s have the same meat supplier.

Loyalty cards are a done deal. Either use it or lose money.

😂

If the data of shoppers wasn't valuable, merchants wouldn't be buying it. There would be no offers (or 'offers') for what amounts to an exchange of personal data for a small discount and there would be no trade between companies for the data of clients.

Even the likes of Visa and Mastercard sell off customer data. It's a big business. I'm not sure why you're trivialising people's privacy concerns so much when they don't want their data to be profiled and sold as part of such trades. It's basically 'don't concern yourself about your data being sold by us to make us money at your expense', with a scornful laugh.

How do you feel about the fact that the people most in need of cheaper shops are the ones who, statistically, are least likely to have the necessary phone apps/ clubcards to access the artificially lower prices?

But that supplier will have different levels of quality.

Just like a factory supplying Primark and Jigsaw will have different levels of quality. It’s the retailer that decides quality levels.

Nobody forces anybody to take a nectar card I don't understand why people complain about "reward cards" whilst using a reward card. Anyway £2 for organic milk is fine isn't it hopefully the farmer gets some of it.

I understand UPF food but I have to shop within my budget
Aldi sells meat, fruit, veg, rice, potatoes etc and I use that to... cook from scratch
Why is that worse than buying ready meals from Sainsbury's or Asda?
Aldi doesn't just sell UPF food

Yanbu I hate all the big supermarkets and the way they dick around with prices. Like bollocks was a fucking factory pizza ever going to be sold for £5.50 for crap's sake, so "nectar price" isn't a bloody saving - it's a way of coercing you to give up your data so you don't get even more ripped off than usual. Also I have noticed over the past few years that often the shelf ticket doesn't keep up with the many many wild price fluctuations, or there's no ticket at all, or there's a ticket but the entire shelf has a different but similar looking product which, oh what a coincidence, is twice the price of the mysteriously missing one.

And on top of that, you have to check everything through yourself and pay anything up to £1.50 for a frigging bastard bag. They can all fuck off.

I get a fresh coffee delivery (£15 for three packs which is pretty much the same as you'd pay for far less fresh in Sainsbury's), a veg box delivery (oddbox which is very good), go to the butcher and fishmonger on a Saturday morning, M&S/Waitrose for perishables, Lidl for tins. M&S is cheaper than tesco, sainsbury etc for what I consider staples like bread, eggs, milk, cereal, cheese, butter (I won't buy spread any more because it's disgusting since shrinkflation, dunno what manufacturers are beefing it up with - petrol maybe?) and their prices have been much more stable than anywhere else these past few years.

Yep I'm pissed off with nectar/club card pricing. I don't always have my phone on me and if I do the app often crashes. If I have to go to Sainsbury's or Tesco then I actually end up buying less as I resent paying the higher prices for things if I can't get the frigging club card to load on my phone and don't want to risk having to pay twice as much at the till.
our local lidl is great so I do big shop there - I'm not convinced any different in quality between lidl and the other supermarkets. anything I can't get from there I top up at waitrose (I go after work and often get yellow stickered items too).

I guarantee no-one would be able to tell mince, carrots, milk or most other products from Sainsburys or Aldi apart if they didn't know where it came from.

All these threads go the same way with a vocal minority insisting that all products from Aldi turn into compost/sour yogurt the second they are removed from the store. I've been shopping in Aldi amongst other places for far longer than it's been socially acceptable and the fresh produce lasts the same as from anywhere else.

I don't buy UPF in Aldi or Lidl.

The organic milk works out as 50p a pint. The farmer gets about 41p per litre.