How 'product shrinkage' increases prices by stealth

Take a look at these two bottles. The one on the right - bought a few months ago - contained 500ml of red wine vinegar. The significantly smaller one on the left, which my husband just picked up from Tesco for £1.23, has only 350ml.

I'm pretty sure I paid around £1.19 for that larger bottle which worked out at 24p per 100ml. The new size works out at 35p per 100ml - a whopping increase in a short period.

I can't for the life of me see why we should pay so much for vinegar. French supermarkets have it at a fraction of the price. In many branches you can't even buy an own brand vinegar now though I notice from mysupermarket.co.uk that Asda has a 350ml bottle for 67p - that's 56p a bottle cheaper than the Aspall branded one.

Product shrinkage has of course been going on for a while but it seems to me it's got way more prevalent recently as this report from Which? last year suggests. I've noticed fewer teabags in some of the packets I buy, for example. Have you spotted any incredible shrinking products lately?

Check your till receipt!

This afternoon I found I'd been short-changed by Tesco on a special offer. It's the second time in a month that's happened - that I've been aware of although there may well have been other occasions.

I bought a couple of packs of herbs on a 2 for £1 offer instead of their normal price of 82p and 79p but the full amount was rung up at the till. I thought the total was more than I expected and checked the receipt. When I took it back I found that I'd been overcharged 61p.

A similar thing happened the other day at Somerfield on a 2 for 1 deal on kitchen towel.

I'm reluctant to conclude it's deliberate - I can't think supermarkets would be so stupid as to consciously swindle their customers. Putting a positive construction on what happened there are so many special offers these days it must be hard to make sure they all get accurately logged onto the system. But had these purchases been part of a larger shop rather than a small one I suspect I wouldn't have noticed. It would be easy enough to slip by.

So I suggest, if you don't already do so, you keep track as far as possible of what you're spending and scrutinise your receipt carefully before you pay or leave the shop.

Do you have a similar experience of being overcharged?

Another supermarket pricing rant

I was going to blog about the two fabulous old cookbooks I picked up for a song in Devon last week but this week has been so manic I'll have to content myself with whingeing - once again - about supermarket pricing which almost matches MPs expenses claims for its deviousness.

My husband who was cooking supper last night doesn't really believe in veg so I nipped down the road to get some from Tesco (Yes, groan) We were having grilled mackerel and I fancied broccoli and it was on special offer so that seemed the perfect solution. Except for the fact that even with 20p off it cost 79p.

I know this is absolutely par for the course but occasionally you stop and think that that is a ridiculous amount of money to pay for a small head of broccoli for two (particularly if you paid the full price). Since when did it cost nearly a £1 to produce and transport a non-organic, mass-produced vegetable? (Not that I'm sure the grower got anything like that). No wonder we're unhealthy in this country when basic veg cost as much as this. It certainly explains why Tesco continues to earn billions a year and is thinking of setting up its own bank. It's certainly got plenty of money to lend.

Anyway my new quick trick with veg like broccoli is to part stir-fry, part-steam them in a frying pan. I sweated off a sliced leek for a few seconds, added the broccoli florets (the stalks will go into a soup), stir fried a couple of minutes with a little fresh garlic then added half a glass or so of water and stirred and tossed until the broccoli was tender (about another 2 minutes), adding a slosh of light soy sauce at the end.

I also added a tiny handful of living salad leaves from the plants I bought a couple of weeks back. Unorthodox but there were too few to make a salad and the effect was rather nice, like adding a scattering of herbs. One pot is looking rather sickly though. I've either watered it too much or too little . . . Any thoughts?

Fairtrade should apply to our producers too

My visit to the farmers' market this morning has left me feeling quite depressed. Apart from one stall whose produce is always snapped up the moment they start trading there are signs that producers are struggling. Independent shops too. The nearby organic butcher admitted sales were down and that the farm from which his meat comes had had to lay off workers.

But a new Italian-style café nearby was buzzing with people out for breakfast and brunch.

What to make of it all? Obviously some people have money but don't choose to spend it on organic food - or even on cooking from scratch. If half of the local food producers go to the wall I don't honestly think they would very much care. There's a new Waitrose down the road so what's the problem?

It's the people who have bought into the organic and local movement over the last 10 years that I'm more concerned about. They surely did so for a reason - healthier food for their families and/or supporting small producers to ensure a diverse local food culture. Now that times are hard surely these things are just as important? Even if you buy slightly less often or spend less when you do, it makes a difference.

Small producers don't always do themselves a favour, true. Being small and farming organically doesn't necessarily mean you produce quality food. Pricing is sometimes ridiculous (some artisanal cheeses cost more per kilo than fillet steak) Few seem to use any imagination about the way they present and market their goods - offering deals to tempt their customers into buying more but the main problem seems to be that their case is going by default.

The Fairtrade Foundation has done a fantastic job of making us more conscious of the value of supporting third world producers but someone needs to do a similar job for our homegrown ones or very few of them will survive the current downturn.

And those of us who do still buy from them should be prepared to put our heads above the parapet and say how important it is, even at the risk of jibes about being elitist. If it was worth paying extra to feed our families healthy food a year ago, it still is now, even if we have to give up something else to do it.

Is this a fair analysis? Let me know what you think. Are you finding your local food shops are struggling? Have you cut down the amount you spend on food from small producers? Do you feel you can afford to pay the prices they charge? Do we owe them a living or should market forces prevail?

Sneaky supermarket pricing strategies

Remember a time - not so long ago - when the standard advice on how to save money on fruit and veg was to buy them loose? And that the best bargains were on the bottom shelf? I've trotted those tips out myself more times than I care to mention but have to tell you now they're out of date.

Pre-packed veg can be cheaper than loose ones. The best bargains can be at eye-level.

Here's an example from Somerfield just now. Loose potatoes, sold down on the bottom shelf are £1.65 a kilo or 75p a lb. (That's not new potatoes which are £2 a kilo) If you buy a pack of four, which I'm guessing would come to about 800g, they're only 90p. Even organic potatoes, sold at eye-level at £1.03 a kilo, are cheaper.

How on earth does this make sense? Well, for what it's worth, my hypothesis is this. Potatoes are a staple - people don't have to be encouraged to buy them. Supermarkets (or rather their suppliers) are taking a hit on the special offers they're doing so they need to make it up somewhere else. They want a minimum spend on lines like potatoes so they want to encourage you to buy a pack rather than the amount you actually need.

None of which is good news for pensioners and other people on a budget who are living on their own but since when have the supermarkets cared about them?

You will almost certainly find potatoes - and other veg - more cheaply if you go to a street market, greengrocer or farm shop but if you're buying them in supermarkets be on your guard!

Sunday afternoon bargains

We haven't quite got our act together since we got back on Friday so found ourselves scouring the local shops at 4.30 for something for supper tonight.

Tesco Metro turned up trumps with a pack of three pork chops which had been reduced from £3.37 to £1.69 and some reduced spring onions (67p down to 35p, which is actually what they should be at this time of year). I cooked the chops on a ridged grill pan and deglazed the juices with some white wine which had surprisingly survived the 10 days I'd been away, chucking in a couple of thin slices of the butter at the end. Half the onions got stir fried with some button mushrooms and finely sliced runner beans which I'd bought yesterday without any clear idea what I was going to do with them. (A cardinal sin for a frugal cook ;-)

We also picked up a huge organic loaf in the health food shop for half price (£1.10) and - even better - two pieces of carrot cake for £1, a comforting tea-time treat for a cold afternoon. (Was it only a few days ago I was complaining about the heat? I must have been mad!)

I'd forgotten there are often good bargains at this time on a Sunday. Where we used to live in St Albans the Sainsbury's Local at the petrol station down the road used to have brilliant reductions such as a whole chicken for £1.99 or a piece of steak for £1.25. Prices were sometimes reduced by as much as 70%. Bet they don't hang about on the shelves for long now.

Latest salvo in the supermarket price war

Back to Blighty yesterday to be greeted by a full page ad in the Times (and probably other papers too) publicising Sainsbury’s ‘Big 5’ deals on fruit and veg. Which bears more than a fleeting resemblance to Aldi’s weekly fruit and veg promotion, the Aldi Super 6.

Could it be that the big boys are getting rattled by the migration of an increasing number of newly budget-conscious customers prepared to give the discounters a go? I suspect it could. According to recent figures from the market research company TNL Aldi’s sales increased over 20% in the 12 weeks to the 15th of June, giving it its highest ever share of the UK grocery market at just under 3%. Those sales have to be coming from somewhere.

How good are the Sainsbury’s bargains though? Well, as usual, a mixed bag. No-one could complain at 49p for a melon (20p less than Aldi’s) or 39p for a bag of radishes but new potatoes still sound expensive at 89p a bag (it doesn’t specify the weight)and berries may or may not be good value depending on whether you’re paying the 99p or £1.99p mentioned in the ad. Half price, as I've pointed out before, is not such a big deal if the price was excessive in the first place.

To put that in perspective here’s a list of prices my fellow blogger Signe Johansen spotted at the North End Market in London last weekend:

2 pineapples for £1
2 v.large bunches bananas for £1
9 lemons for £1
2lb cherries for £1
2 punnets of blackberries for £1
8 perfectly ripe apricots for £1
1 large watermelon for £1
3 galia melons for £1.20
2 large aubergines for £1

And some of you have pointed out even better bargains outside London.

So let’s have a ‘bargain of the week’ contest. Whoever comes up with the best deal this week gets a signed copy of my book The Frugal Cook when it’s published next month! Fire away . . .

Should Gordon be bossing us about?

I was amused to read today that Gordon Brown was telling us to be more frugal and not to waste so much food.

He's absolutely right, of course, but is it the PM's job to tell us how to run our households?

The context is the G8 summit in which I suspect most people in this country are profoundly disinterested and on which there is unlikely to be much real progress in solving the world's growing food shortages. So he chose to pronounce on a subject that plays well to the audience at home (nothing party political about this - all politicians do it)

The fact that his involvement is controversial is all to the good - the media have all picked up on it.

Those who hate the idea of the 'nanny state' will object vociferously. Those that think that it's time we all addressed these issues will approve.

Shows there's a need for this blog though ;-)

Supermarket price wars - good news or bad news?

Being slightly out of the loop over in France the latest round of supermarket price cuts had passed me by so thanks to regular contributor career misfit for dropping me a line to point them out.

At one level it's obviously good news that the big four are reacting to the low prices being charged by Lidl and Aldi but canny shoppers will need to be careful. In my experience what supermarkets offer with one hand (usually at the expense of their suppliers) they take with another so for every bargain you spot watch out for a price rise. As I pointed out recently it wasn't so long ago that Tesco, to take one example, was charging over £1 for a single red pepper. Of course any 'reduction' looks brilliant by comparison.

We've been here before with 20p loaves and 9p cans of beans, attention-grabbing offers on which supermarkets are happy to take a loss to entice you through their doors. Fine if you just snap up the bargain. Less good if you meander through the aisles randomly picking up other bits and pieces without keeping a sharp eye open as to whether you're being overcharged for them. If grapes are just 50p for 500g for example as they were at the weekend at Asda what price are they charging for raspberries? (Actually I've just checked that. £1.98 for 170g or £11.65 a kilo which proves my point . . .)

It's also worth remembering (at the risk of teaching my grandmother to suck eggs) that supermarkets don't automatically have the best prices. I'm sure I could beat the £1.88 that Morrisons is apparently asking for 454g of strawberries according to the Daily Record and if you're seriously trying to cut back why buy rump steak even if they're only charging £8.98 a kilo for it?

It's getting to the stage where you need a degree in maths to go shopping.

Half price but how good a saving is it?

There's a full page ad in the Guardian (and probably other papers) today showing the massive savings that Sainsbury's is offering on fresh fruit. Save £2, it trumpets, on strawberries which are down from £3.99 to £1.99 this week or £1.69 on nectarines down from £3.39 to £1.69.

Now don't get me wrong, Sainsbury's if you're reading this. I'm sure these fruits have been on sale at the higher price over the last few weeks. In fact the small print at the bottom of the page tells you exactly when those prices were charged. The question is was that a reasonable amount to charge at the time for fruit that was only just coming into season and, probably in the case of stone fruits like plums and apricots, as hard as a rock? As I pointed out yesterday you can buy a can of apricots that taste as good for just 24p.

If you look more carefully at the cherry offer you'll also spot that the not-so-special offer of £1.99 is for only 300g of cherries. I paid 68p a quarter pound (110g) in my local greengrocer the other day which works out at £1.85 for 300g and I'm sure he hasn't got a fraction of the buying power of Sainsbury's

Oh, and if you're looking for these products in a Sainsbury's Central or Local you may not find these reductions anyway. Not all stores stock these lines at these prices, the company is careful to state (again in the small print).

Sainsbury's of course is not the only supermarket which does this kind of promotion. As I remarked yesterday on Beyond Baked Beans Tesco is currently offering fresh peppers for 32p each which looks like a fantastic reduction from the 88p they were charging a couple of weeks ago (or indeed for the £1 plus I saw them charging back in April or May) but in effect amounts to no more than that we're finally being asked to pay a reasonable price for produce for which we've previously been charged well over the odds. About time, but no great cause for celebration.

Global food prices - the sobering reality

My efforts to save the odd pound here and there are put firmly into perspective by a sobering series of reports in the Guardian today and on their website

For millions of people it's not a question of cutting back but of surviving.

While food only accounts for an average 10% of the expenditure of UK households it can account for as much as 80% of that of poor families in the developing world. This Food Diary of a family in northern Cairo shows how prices have nearly doubled in the past year.

Two other things I read really struck home. First that land that could be used for growing food for Egypt's growing population is used to grow out of season crops such as beans and strawberries for the UK market. Second just how much fertile land it takes to feed livestock. According to the Guardian report, one acre of land can produce 138lbs of protein from grain but only 20lbs of protein from beef.

We should all be eating a lot less meat.

Cheap cuts aren't cheap - and nor is anything else, it seems

I finally found a beef cut that's popular in France but hard to find here (back in England) - cotes de boeuf or beef ribs, ironically sold at my local organic butchers as pot au feu. It's not ridiculously expensive at £8.75 a kilo (though that includes quite a lot of bone and fat) and should easily serve four. But it would have been no more than 8 euros a kilo (about £6) in France.

It underlines just how pricey so called 'cheap cuts' have become - including mince and braising steak. The only thing that's really cheap still is offal and how many people like offal? Not a lot.

I managed to spend £33 just now on restocking the fridge and storecupboard - admittedly just over £19 of that at the health food shop (on yoghurt, eggs, granola, oatcakes, crackers, hummus and two different cheeses for which I realise they've managed to overcharge, not intentionally I'm sure). That's just this weekend's eating.

Prices have definitely gone up in the month we've been away, but why are they so much more expensive here than in France? There'd be rioting on the streets if the shops charged as much there.