To think this increase in cost is going to break me?

[Yummmyy]

I earn a decent salary. Whenever I go to Tesco for a basic food shop, sone items are going up literally 50p plus within a matter of two weeks. Orange juice was 2.20 for Tesco’s basic, the most expensive 4.30!!

Yes I know orange juice isn’t an essential but when you’re well above minimum wage and have to cut something like that out of your food shop it does make you question what’s the point… anyone else relate to this? I just don’t know where it’s going to end

Yes, us too. One sausage less, add a slice of bread, all happy! Beans/cheese/sardines/eggs on toast used to be a lunch. Now it’s a main meal.

Quite often though with the Aldi or Lidl copies you will find that the ingredients aren’t as good as the real thing.

Can I say that nowadays I find Sainsbury’s cheaper than Asda. Also yo can game their nectar card system. If you buy the same stuff every week they will offer you cheaper prices and then you can stock up. One week tomatoes will be 69p instead of 99p. One week bread will be cheaper. This week I was shocked when they offered me cheaper olive oil! Let me show you.

Supermarkets have enormous control over meat production.

"How the supermarkets came to own UK agriculture | The Farming Forum"
https://thefarmingforum.co.uk/index.php?threads/how-the-supermarkets-came-to-own-uk-agriculture.337882/

You are people, are you going to refuse to pay?

There’s a cut off to how much rent you get on the housing element / UC. Which is difficult in private rentals because landlords are taking the piss out of tenants with a new increase every year, this is why we are seeing so many homeless people and no fault evictions.

Housing benefit doesn’t match rent prices anymore unless the tenants are in social housing and there isn’t enough of them to go round. As we are a growing population with no adequate affordable housing thanks to various governments in the past 40 years.

You also have to pay small increments of council tax every month, which as you can imagine once they have paid gas, water, electric, subsidised their rent etc theres very little over to afford food, travel etc.

I volunteer in a food bank so i get to see how tough it is first hand how difficult it is for these people. It really boils my piss that some people believe media / tabloid propaganda and that all people on benefits are lazy or living the high life because most are certainly not.

And now we have labour going for the disabled and “lazy” when what they should be doing is putting an end to unstable zero hour contracts, building more social housing ALL over the uk not just down south. Not building new bloody runways.

It’s just a cycle of poverty in this country if you’re unfortunate enough to be born on the bread line. The older i get i’m starting to believe thats how our governments want it.

Disgruntled labour voter who will not vote for any of the lying shower of shits again in my life.

Sometimes only the packaging is different though. For example, we found that the contents of two own brand boxes of Christmassy chocolate biscuits were exactly the same from Waitrose and Aldi. Only the outer cardboard boxes and the prices were different, with the Waitrose ones from memory being a couple of pounds more. The manufacturer must have been the same.

Absolutely agree with you and the prices you mention per week are exactly the trajectory my Lidl shop has followed. I now go to Farmfoods for some things and use the Lidl app to at least claim my free items. Heck, as I only shop once a week, I turn straight back round and go in again to get the free thing as the voucher only lasts a week. For Morrisons, where I go to shop for an elderly relative so sometimes have to do my own shop there through lack of time, I buy a pre-paid voucher and get 5% off. It’s not a lot but it’s worth having.

I have my groceries delivered (can't get out to supermarket easily) and finding it increasingly difficult to eat within my food budget. I'm also seeing less price difference between the likes of tesco & sainsburys vs waitrose & m&s - often the difference in cost comes down to ~£5.

Don't have an aldi or lidl near me & I'm thinking about growing my own veg this year to try & keep costs down

We all know prices have always risen, but they have never risen to the extent they have since Brexit. Surely you must have noticed!?

We buy spices and condiments in Home Bargains. Ditto loo roll, bin liners, cleaning products, painkillers etc. Never from a supermarket.
And screw you Sainsburys for pricing coffee at £7.95 when the same brand in a bigger jar is £5 at B and M opposite.
We stopped buying olive oil completely. We get rapeseed or a blend of olive and another oil.
To the poster considering a water meter, we were paying £80 a month(family of 4) and it’s less than half that since the meter was installed. No change in the usage.

it's not completely irrelevant, as it's useful to know whether it's just a british issue, or a much larger one. If it was just here then it would make it more likely the government could perhaps do something to lower it, or at least there would be clear explanations (e.g. being on an island making it harder to transfer goods/our climate making it harder to grow some things). The fact that prices are high worldwide means that even if the government could perhaps do more to help, some things are out of their control.

I saw a tiktok today of someone in the US where a 12 pack of basic, non free range eggs were 7 dollars (about £5.65, whereas they would be about £1.60 here). So more than 3 times as much, and there were lots of people saying in the comments that $7 was cheap compared to where they lived.

However it's also important to bear in mind that, while food might be more expensive in other countries, either many wages (at least professional, if not minimum wage) are also correspondingly much higher, e.g. in the USA, or Canada, or quality of life is usually considered to be better (the nordic countries).

Being a low wage country, with continually stretched resources AND expensive food is a bit of a perfect shit storm.

It's the same shit show every year for me
Min wage goes up, great
The next month the letters start about council tax increase, water, gas, electric and I'm back to where I was

YANBU
I've kept all my Hello Fresh and Green Chef recipes and I buy the ingredients myself in bulk and batch cook the recipes, this works quite well. I shop around for cheapest ingredients but I am lucky that I have a car

I mean everyone get together like they did with the poll tax.

Heres a radical idea.

If peppercorns are too expensive DON'T BUY THEM. They're not an Essential, they have 0 nutrition.

Olive Oil has rocketed, so I use much more sparingly and use cheaper oils where appropriate for health and taste.

Same with anything - adjust your mindset. Lots of foods are out of season here and rack up the carbon footprint for no real need. No-one needs to eat salads in winter nor strawberries in Spring.

Self-indulgence is what it is. Pack it in.

No. Refuse to Buy, not Refuse to Pay - that would be stealing!!

We have to pay our full mortgage and council tax on UC. No help for that whatsoever. We do work as well.

We rely on a weekly supermarket delivery. Living rurally, the delivery fee is cheaper than petrol would cost driving to a supermarket. It means that we miss out on cheaper prices available at Lidl, Aldi, Home Bargains and so on, and the stickered reduced items at the end of the day, but again I factor in what it would cost in petrol and time to drive around looking for those cheaper priced items.

Another benefit of doing the main grocery shop online is that it is easier than in the busy store to check the price per ml or 100g to find the cheapest, best value items and to work out whether special offers are actually cheaper or not.

I have set a budget and meal plan for the full week, but it has become increasingly difficult to stick to that budget and it has got much harder so far this year. Even buying absolutely everything at the cheapest price per ml or 100g, (and removing from the basket any treats like an inexpensive bottle of wine, chocolate, non-basic biscuits and a weekly newspaper all of which used to come within budget not so long ago), I can't stick within budget now unless I cut back on food. As a family we are far from overeaters as it is and there is never any food or other products wasted.

I avoid going to the shops in between the weekly delivery as that just results in spending more money over the budget and being tempted to buy things we can do without. The exception to this is that I want to support our local small rural shops as much as I can, so I keep an eye on what is not massively more expensive in them and buy those things there instead of from the supermarket.

Our council tax is going up by 10% for the fourth year running. 40% in four years is depressing when the council have cut back on bin collections, public toilets, libraries, shut down many council buildings. It's down to social care and increased police costs they say.

Our water bills are going up 40% over the next five years. My 19 year old car road tax was £350 this month.

It's not just food, but everything that's increasing.

Oh bullshit. I cook from scratch due to dietary restrictions and my shopping bill has gone up by almost a third in the last year. The only processed food I ever buy is the odd packet of beige freezer food for when DD’s friends come round!

They do.

I've said before on this thread that supermarkets are a highly competitive business, and their profit margins are very low. Last year's, Tesco had a profit margin of 4.1%. For people that don't understand accounts, that means for every £100 of sales, £95.90 was costs and £4.10 was profit.

To put price rises in perspective, minimum wage is going up by 6.7% in April.

National insurance is going up from 13.8% to 15%. Which sounds like a 1.2% increase - but it's an increase of £1.20 in every £100 earned by their employees - but in terms of their own costs, it's a £1.20 increase for every £13.80 they spend, which is an increase of 8.7%.

And that's on top of an additional £615 per employee earning over £9,100 per year (and a smaller increase for every employee earning between £5k and £9.1k).

And then you have to understand that every business that Tesco buys from will be facing the same increases in costs, so everything they buy will also have price increases.

Yeah, they make a massive amount of profit, there's no denying it. But it's because it's a massive business with massive sales. They simply don't have the profit margin to absorb every increased cost

Some things are just beyond the pale now; olive oil a distant memory, the price of jam has especially shocked me. Luckily I like plain basic things, especially lentils and they've not gone up afaik- can still get a big tub of meridian peanut butter for £5 when tesco have it on offer. I try to be strategic and stock up on the bargains when they are on!

Five years I used to buy Waitrose via Ocado. I generally kept my weekly shop under £50. If it was over, I checked in case I'd made a mistake. Usually, it was just because I'd accidentally put two of something in or left the gin I used to hold the delivery slot in the basket.

Now, I struggle to keep the same shop under £50 in Aldi. I only buy gin for my birthday and I actively restrict treats on cost, not nutritional grounds! I've lost around £1000 of disposable income. EVERYTHING has gone up by about 50%. Mortgage, energy, house, pet and car insurance, mobile phone, water, Netflix, Disney+, Equifax. EVERYTHING.

It's like I've had a £1000 a month payout. I feel like I've dropped two income brackets. All the fun and frivolity is gone. All the spontaneity. Its crap. AND it's OK to feel it's crap even if you aren't starving and are still grateful for what you do have.

I read recently on MN about meat from China being sold in butchers shops in the UK. The expectation when buying from a butchers is usually that the meat will be local or at least mainly from the UK. I wonder how open the butchers are with customers about the origin of the meat. It would never have occurred to me that I might be buying meat from China. I assume those butchers selling meat from China are doing so for cost and profit reasons. How can it be cheaper to produce meat in China and transport it all the way over here? This is presumably because of poorer conditions in China for the animals and workers. Then there are the freshness and carbon footprint issues of unnecessarily transporting food so far. Has the UK really come to this? That our local butchers are reduced to selling meat from China? I wonder how much this actually reduces prices for consumers and profit for butchers?