Full Time Care

I noticed something again yesterday which has had me fuming for a while now: supermarket prices. Most folks barely notice the price changes that occur all the time, since they do one big shop on a regular basis. When you’re spending hundreds, the pennies are less remarkable. Personally, I shop every day or every other day (because I can’t carry much) on a limited budget, so I see things in a different light.

The change that annoyed me was at Waitrose, which then made me think of one I’ve seen at Somerfield. For the uninitiated, Waitrose is an ‘upper class’ supermarket. In other words, they think they should only stock high quality items - and charge ludicrously high prices for them. Somerfield is at the other end of things: cheap and cheerful. As always, certain things cost less in one place than another, so I tend to shop in three or four stores, picking up the best bargains in each.

Yesterday, I needed some green beans. My partner loves them with garlic. I normally pick up six tins (I’d rather buy fresh, but the prices are insane) at 33p each. That’s a couple of pounds total. Yesterday, Waitrose had done their regular price check and - presumably because people have been buying a lot of beans - the price had gone up to 52p a tin. Now, I understand supply and demand, but a 19p (57%) price rise from one week to the next is just taking the piss.

That, in turn, reminded me of the cheap noodles at Somerfield. You know, those little packs of instants that are in their basics range? We buy those to put with other stuff and, at a normal price range of 9-11p each, they’re dirt cheap. The weird thing is that they change price every week as well. I’ve seen them at 7p and I’ve seen them at 19p. From lowest to highest, that’s a 170% increase! How crazy is that? Same with basic baked beans: minimum 17p a tin, now at 34p (last time I bothered to look).

Now, I know we’re talking about pennies here, so price changes seem bigger. But consider this: I would buy half a dozen tins of beans and half a dozen packs of noodles. At their lowest prices, that’s £2.40 total. At their highest, it’s £4.26 - almost twice as much. Apply the same principle to a big (or even small-and-very-regular) shop and you’ve got a pretty damned scary situation.

Even worse is that there’s no reason or warning: the prices just change, and nobody says a darned thing. It always seems to happen on the popular items, too - those I’m buying half a dozen of because they’re cheap and fit in my extremely limited budget. Money-grubbing scumbag grocery shops. Bah.