Shopping - No Small Change

What are your preferred food-shopping habits? Are you a devotee of On-Line-delivered-to-your-door supermarket shopping or do you prefer to shop in person, in a bricks and mortar store? Are you loyal to one particular supermarket brand or do you vary your allegiance? Do you buy in bulk from cash-and-carry stores like Costco or their On-Line equivalents? Do you make use of the increasing number of budget supermarket stores in the UK such as Aldi and Lidl? Do you shop at a local market, farmer's or other? Do you bypass supermarkets and buy direct from suppliers, either in person or On-Line?

For most of us, the answers to these questions are largely dictated by the simple constraints of geographical convenience, available time, the nature and extent of our storage facilities and our budget as well as personal preferences.

Shopping has changed as an activity almost out of all recognition, in my lifetime. When I was a small child, growing up in the late sixties / early seventies, in a leafy suburb of North-West London, there were no big supermarkets within easy reach. Especially as my mother then didn't drive and shopping had to be done on foot, with assorted scratchy baskets and string bags in tow. Carrier bags were not then, as again now, freely offered to contain your goods. We didn't have a big freezer at home - only that little freezing compartment you used to get at the top of your below-the-counter fridge - it held an ice cube tray, a brick of frozen chopped spinach and maybe another brick of Walls' Neapolitan ice cream and nothing else. The fridge itself, (minus the space taken up by the freezing compartment), was pretty limited in capacity too. There was a walk-in larder though and plenty of cupboards for storing non-perishable foods. My mother, brought up under rationing in wartime Britain, regarded these cupboards as her insurance against prolonged siege or famine and you could have lived for months, even years, off her hoard of tins, bottled fruit and dry goods. You still can, actually! It's become something of a family joke.

Extracting stuff from these cupboards was, and still is, not a task for the faint-hearted. My mother is quite short (barely over 5') and these cupboards are both deep and lofty, so it always falls to my father, who is now not far off eighty, to climb an ancient, rickety stepladder, and rummage about in search of whatever it is that my mother is after. The required item is always at the back and only extracted after a small avalanche of cantilevered boxes and cartons heads south, which is sometimes headed off at the pass and sometimes isn't. My father surveyed this task and its attendant perils with limited enthusiasm fifty years ago and he hasn't got any keener on it since! Understandably so!

To supplement the withstand-a-siege-cupboards and the daily delivery of milk in tall, glass bottles from Harry, the milkman, my mother shopped little and often.

from "Shopping with Mother" by  M E Gagg; illustrated by Harry Wingfield,
(London: Ladybird Books Ltd, 1958)

Each expedition was a series of old-fashioned encounters: at Mr Baron's, the greengrocer's, the butcher's, Mr Sanders, whose shop floor was strewn with a thick layer of sawdust and where you handed over your money at a separate kiosk at the back of the shop, (for eminently sensible hygiene reasons, so that the person handling the meat didn't handle money as well), and at an independent small grocery, endearingly named, Pat-a-Cake's.

from "Shopping with Mother" by  M E Gagg; illustrated by Harry Wingfield, 
(London: Ladybird Books Ltd, 1958)

As a child, I used to find these shopping expeditions rather a bore - the walk was quite long for a small child and I hated helping to carry those cumbersome string bags stuffed with dirty potatoes in flimsy, brown, paper bags and heavy, green cabbages that bumped my legs all the way home. Making patterns with the toes of my sandals in the sawdust of Mr Sanders' shop while my mother bought lamb's liver, or steak and kidney, was a small compensation. Very occasionally, we were allowed to go into the sweet shop, Pratt's, and spend our pocket money on vivid, glassy lollipops, pastel-coloured flying-saucers made from rice paper, or small paper bags of sherbet lemons and pear drops, weighed out by the ounce, from big glass jars. Now, despite all the wonders of modern food supply, I look back fondly at that time and wish for it again, dirty potatoes, bumpy cabbages, scratchy baskets, cumbersome string bags and all.

Alcoholic beverages, (usually Amontillado sherry or gin, not wine), came from what my father still refers to as "the wine merchant". Shopping there was done by him, not my mother, on a Saturday morning. Sometimes, I would go with him and sniff the intriguing smells of cork, wood shavings and the faint whiff of yeasty beer that distinguished the shop. For a weekend treat, he and I might also make our way up to the independent baker, Elizabeth's, in the summer, and buy a sponge cake, sandwiched with raspberry jam and genuine, fresh cream for tea. I felt an affinity with Elizabeth's because of the name.

Shopping then was an experience straight out of the Ladybird book, "Shopping With Mother", a book I loved as a very small child. And while I never had long, fair plaits like Susan (more's the pity!), I did have a miniature shopping basket, very like hers, and my mother looked not at all unlike Susan's!

from "Shopping with Mother" by  M E Gagg; illustrated by Harry Wingfield, 
(London: Ladybird Books Ltd, 1958)

Shopping today is totally different. There are very few independent butchers, bakers and candlestick-makers who have survived the competition brought by the big supermarkets with their economies of scale and production. Such as there are, tend to be specialists of some kind and expensive for using every day. The choice available to us in the big supermarkets in the developed world is unbelievably wide. Take olive oil for example. In the early 1970s, olive oil BP (sic) was something you bought at Boots The Chemists in small, medicinal-size bottles. Go into any supermarket today and the range of olive oil on sale is huge - Italian, Greek, Spanish? Extra-virgin, green and peppery, mild? Single estate, blended? 500ml? A litre? No problem. It's all there. And the same applies to many other goods.

The Internet has brought supermarkets and faraway suppliers otherwise out of reach to the tips of our fingers, as we sit at home. Most supermarkets sell a good deal more than food. You can pick up clothes, bedding, kitchen equipment and more, along with your groceries in the glories of the one-stop shop. I know I am old-fashioned here, but I do not like this growing tendency. It's most convenient to be able to pick up a bottle of wine along with the ingredients for supper and non-food, but kitchen-related, stuff I can cope with, but I do not like being confronted with lawnmowers and chain-saws when I am buying milk and potatoes!

Apart from the lawnmowers-cheek-by-jowl-with-milk-and-potatoes issue, these changes are positive - far more convenient and they offer a much wider landscape for culinary creativity and I am deeply grateful for both. Working full time, six days a week, means my shopping time is limited. I don't have time to shop as my non-working mother did.  But I still hanker after those days and given half a chance, I'd snap them up again.

As I mentioned in my initial post about this £1-a-day Food Challenge, my shopping habits have changed radically over the last few weeks. I am delighted at what the changes have brought about and food-shopping has become, for the time being anyway, a bit of an adventure.

The shift has had to take place in advance of the project itself in order to make sure that instead of the normal brands I buy of basics such as flour, sugar, tea, rice, oil, etc, etc I have replaced them with significantly cheaper ones so that when I come to use them in the challenge itself, I am not inadvertently blowing my budget.

The swapping over process has inevitably taken some time and quite a lot of patient searching and sourcing and I'm glad I started it early. My go-to source of help on the quest for cheap buys has been mysupermarket.co.uk which is a quick and easy tool for comparing prices across all the standard UK supermarkets. It didn't take more than a few minutes of doing price comparisons to realise that I have been paying way over the odds for a huge number of items. A very large proportion of what I have been buying from Ocado or Waitrose can be had for a fraction of the price elsewhere. Not everything, but a lot. I realise that I have got a bit sloppy about food-shopping and have got set in ways which, while convenient, are actually costing me a great deal of unnecessary money.

Of course, one has to be clear about whether one is comparing apples with apples or apples with pears, figuratively speaking. Soft brown sugar, for example, varies quite a bit, not just in price but in texture and flavour and I greatly prefer Waitrose's soft light brown muscovado sugar to cheaper soft brown sugar brands which don't seem to have the deep aromatic flavour of the Waitrose muscovado. But a red onion is a red onion is a red onion, if you see what I mean.

Anyway, I have been slashing my Ocado order by two thirds and have been sourcing most of my other stuff from Aldi.

It's two miles further away than Waitrose but in the scheme of things it's a comparable trip so there's no real extra cost in travelling. It's been a revelation shopping there. A basket of goods that would have cost me £35 or more in Waitrose, has come out at little over £15 at Aldi and the shopping experience itself has been slick and straightforward. There are no frills and the range of goods on sale is much smaller but all the basics are there, for a fraction of the price. I find it best to go with a balance of clear planning and a defined list of what I want but with enough flexibility to be open to picking up something in this week's special deals that maybe wasn't on the list. Some items are on the shelves this week but they won't be next week so you need to have a bit more flexibility than you would at the other big supermarkets, where there's a predictable consistency of what's on offer.

I've found that a lot of Aldi's stuff is British sourced which I like. Their vegetables are particularly good - tomatoes to die for and really fresh, bright spinach, for example. Soya milk, porridge oats, tinned tomatoes, rice, olive oil - things I buy a lot of - are fine and very much less than the price of my usual ones. You can't buy white bread flour there though, nor many individual herbs and spices. I haven't braved their meat or fish yet - we don't eat a lot of meat and when we do, I want it to be free range which, understandably for a budget store, Aldi doesn't offer nearly so much of. But all in all it's been a very positive shift and one that I shan't be reversing any time soon.

Some things I wanted to use in the £1-a-day food challenge I have had to look further afield for. Dried pulses for example. Lazy old me, I've never bothered to soak and cook dried beans and have always preferred the convenience of tins but dried beans work out much cheaper than tinned ones so were perfect for my budget meal plans. You can't get these in Aldi and actually Sainsbury's turned out to be the best cheap source, along with Lidl for lentils. The nearest Lidl to me is twenty miles away so I had to ask a kind friend with a local Lidl to get those for me. Lidl also came up with the prize for the cheapest white bread flour - 75p for 1.5kg. It's not as good as the Canadian Extra Strong flour I get from Waitrose, but mixed, approximately 50/50, with home-ground wholemeal, it's fine.

Oatmeal proved more problematic. It ought, I felt, to be a cheap foodstuff but a) it isn't as cheap as porridge oats b) it isn't nearly as ubiquitous. In the end I had to speculate to accumulate and had to order 5kg bags of medium and pinhead oatmeal from BuyWholefoodsOnline.co.uk which halved the price per 100g compared to the standard supermarket one.

I had to top the order up with other stuff in order to qualify for the free delivery charge, which doesn't kick in until you spend £30, which was a nuisance, but it's all stuff that will keep and I will use.  This highlighted one of the big pinch points of the poverty trap - in order to access the cheapest deals, such as these, you need capital to lay out, up front. You will save in the long run but you need ready cash initially and that's difficult on a restricted income that, after all, has to cover items other than food such as rent, clothing, utilities etc. My father-in-law helped set up a local credit union to provide very low interest loans for people in this situation, a few years back and I've really appreciated afresh what a practical everyday difference such a facility makes.

I notice that the use-by dates on these bags of oatmeal are the end of January / early February next year and although I expect that, stored carefully, they'll be fine for a while after that, I do hope nobody goes off porridge in a hurry, or my bargain oatmeal won't be quite such a bargain after all!

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