Food prices skyrocketing again!

[cookingthebooks]

DH disagrees, says it’s all stabilised out now and slowed down but he’s not actually done the shop in forever.

This month I’ve just been walking around the supermarket aghast. The price hikes that are going on, my favourite bar of ‘cheap’ dark chocolate has gone from 65p pre Christmas to £1.10!!! Fishcakes from £1.80 to £1.95 and the kids mini pizzas from 45p to 65p all pretty much overnight. There’s lots more and fruit/fresh food have all risen too. I’m really struggling to do the full week shop for our family of four for less than £150 a week now (everything included, pull ups, all work/school lunches, cleaning and toiletries)
Some weeks it’s closer to £170 and I’m very frugal I hate it!

tell me this isn’t just me?

They won't 'get rid of people earning over £5k pa'?

That's less than 8 hours pw from April so they'll need to deal with huge numbers of people doing not even one shift a week each, which will be far harder to manage efficiently than a smaller number of people working more hours. Plus people will be more likely work for competitors, which they probably won't like.

If you only have to work for Tesco on a Monday, you'd be free to work for Asda or any other supermarket on other days.

You’re keen to tell me this level of inflation doesn’t hit hyperinflation parameters so I’m interested to hear if you think goods and services going up by 50% and continuing to rise is good for this country?

I have to disagree with this. We self cater in Portugal, Spain and Mallorca and in all of these places, we have noticed how much cheaper we are buying groceries for. At a large Carrefour in Palma, we shop like actual kings - we eat in for most meals while on holiday here (staying in a property pretty in the middle of nowhere). Because of this, we don't skimp and really go to town with our favourite foods and drinks for the week. This includes several bottles of wine, champagne, local spirits and mixers (none of which we ever buy at home, except at Christmas), and more luxurious desserts etc. than we'd ever have at home. Yet we still seem to end up spending the same or even less than we do on a weekly shop in the UK. It's quite incredible, and combined with the beautiful weather, makes a compelling case for wanting out of here!

Mumsnet is a funny place. So pro farmer and UK food production until it comes to paying a realistic amount for the food they produce.

If goods and services were going up across the board by 50% in a year there would be issues

But inflation ( not a cherry picked item ) is somewhat lower than that so stop panicking

But if you want to avoid hyperinflation at some point you have to take the pain of climate change prevention now

Yes. Sainsbury's 20% mince has gone up to £2.70. Still said £2.49 on the ticket but had gone up on the till.

They're taking the fucking piss.

I've been obsessed with them since I was about 8. 30 years of eating crème eggs and I've decided this is my last year. At this rate they'll be a pound a pop soon.

A box of five is like £4!!! They are half the size they used to be. Bollocks

Yep. I've just dashed out to collect a Tesco order and stood there for ages checking my list because it wasn't a big shop, 4 bags plus a couple of boxes of diet coke, and it was £82. I thought they must have missed out a whole tray but no.

No alcohol either, but I did buy about 4 meat items - only stuff like mince and sausages though, not fillet steak! The lady manning the collection point said that size shop should be about £50, shouldn't it? Yup. I'm noticing it going up even more since Christmas, too, although that may be down to pre-xmas reductions I guess. It's ludicrous.

Most suppliers increase prices in January. Many haven't increased prices to fully reflect their higher costs for a few years now so we'll seeing higher than current inflation rises in some of the supply chain.

But I don't think it's across the board. I just had a look at 3 previous shops from Tesco. 10/12, 29/12 and 17/01. The only item that has increased in price was Cravendale milk has gone up 25p per pint. Pretty much all the other items are the same price.

Supermarkets work on single digit margins - it is not highly profitable

Sainsbury's are on track for £1 billion in profits this year.

The financial illiteracy on this thread is strong….

But their total sales are £30 billion.

They could sell everything at cost, and it would make hardly any difference to the price of individual items or the amount of your weekly shop.

Butter would be 5 p cheaper.

A pack of meat about 10 p

Washing powder maybe 20 p

If you spend £150 pw, it would go down to about £145

It wouldn't take much of a shift in their costs for them to lose a £ billion rather than make that amount of profit.

I've never noticed it more than in these last 2 weeks

It's really hard to get cheap food now, it just is.

Before Xmas in Tesco, I got a pack of 60p choccy digestives, and a little 30p carton of pineapple juice.

The same products this week are 95p and 50p. I put them both back on the shelves.

My salary has gone down not up this year so it's just shit

There’s no 9% reduction.

profits are as follows:
2022: £0.88 billion
2023: £1.8 billion
2024: £2.8 billion

If Tesco had absorbed the NI increase the profit for 2024 would have been £2.55 billion.

Thats still a year increase of 41.6%

This is corporate greed.

I am still very happy with Asda where I live.

It's really hard to get cheap food now

Yes the era of cheap food is over. There are more of us in the world and we all want to eat and its getting trickier to produce and distribute for a whole host of reasons (climate change, soil degradation, war, trade tariffs etc)

Fill us plebs in oh wise one.

Plebs can be financially literate thank you very much

Fill this pleb in oh wise one.

Maybe you better look at their profit after tax? what they actually get in their (or probably yours as a pension holder) pockets?

Preliminary Results 2023/24

It's only £1.2bn, for the enterprise of that scale. Yes, it's significant growth but vs war-time cost rises of 2022/23, but still it's not extravagant at all for the business which employs 1% of total UK workforce.

I calculate that at this week’s prices, Tesco only need to sell 17.4 salmon fillets to pay the annual costs of the NI increase for their entire workforce. The price of fish is fucking insane.

It's insane because Brits essentially won't eat any fish other than the 'big five' (cod, haddock, salmon, tuna, and prawns comprise over 90% of all fish/seafood consumption in the UK, and it is almost all imported into the bargain).

Things like horse mackerel, which is abundant and mostly caught in the Irish Sea, sells for €2 per kilo in Portugal at the height of the season, but almost impossible to find here.

One of the unsaid things about food price inflation is that Brits can no longer really afford to eat a lot of historically traditional food items which we regard almost as a birthright, but at the same time won't even consider some of the alternatives, never mind admit it.

profit after tax isn’t the question here - the question is increase in profits. Feel free to do the maths on the increase of profits after tax if you’d like to. The point remains - they blame NI increases for the increase in food, when they’ve posted record profits. It doesn’t add up. They could have easily absorbed the increase and still posted record profits.

This was August last year, £42 top up shop
I wanted to ask where the rest was

Remember pension funds are likely to include Sainsbury’s in their portfolio either as stand alone or packaged options.

No profit to shareholders, no profit to pension funds. If you are in a DC scheme it’s possible your pot could be impacted.

I get prices have gone up, but we had incredibly low inflation for many years.

I remember the 1970s and, although you can’t do it today, bags of sugar would have 10 price stickers one on top of another, each showing the price going up every week.