Yeah, cheap stuff….
Wednesday 16th July, 2008 - £8,850.98 in debt…
So, apparently inflation is at an 11-year high, Gordon Brown’s telling everyone not to chuck out their food (maybe he wants it for himself…?), and anyone who’s anyone is trying to save money on groceries. It’s the nearest I’ll get to being fashionable while I’m on a budget, so I thought I’d join in.
Last week I was busy getting geared up for a weekend away with the girls, so I thought I’d use www.mysupermarket.com to check whether my favourite wine was on offer anywhere.
MySupermarket is a nifty little site that compares prices from four major UK supermarkets (Tesco, Asda, Sainsbury’s and Ocado) and tells you where you could save the most money. You can give it a list of your usual shopping and ask it to compare the whole lot, or just have a browse for a particular thing - toothbrush, minted peas, whatever.
The wine I was after always seems to be £5.49 whenever and wherever I buy it, without fail, so I wasn’t hopeful. But, according to the site, it was available for £3.89 at Sainsbury’s - what a result! Hooray! And by the time I got there, it was £5.49.
Is this because it only compares online prices? Was I too slow? Is the universe punishing me for something?
Anyway, four days later I overcame this setback and decided to try again, giving it the details of all my usual monthly shopping and asking it to find the cheapest deals. Obviously it’s impossible to do this properly, as you’ll always end up getting impulse purchases and seeing different deals as you browse through a shop, but it’s good to know which one will be cheapest for the bare essentials.
As it turned out, Asda was the best of the best. As a lifelong Tesco shopper, I was a bit wary, but desperate times call for desperate grocery shopping. Unfortunately, the rest of the world and all its shaven-headed children had clearly had the same idea.
The savings we made included:
* £1 for four pints of milk (some kind of special 1% fat milk though - where will I get my fat from now, eh?)
* Various bready things from 10p because we shopped near the end of the day.
* Lemon drizzle cake for £1.79 (near its use-by date but I’m sure that won’t be a problem, and it solves the issue of where my next chunk of fat is coming from).
* Asda own-brand tinned cat food at £3.68 for nine tins.
An hour and a half later, and we’d spent £78.76 - not bad for a month’s shopping for two people, and a saving of about £10 compared to Tesco. But we spent at least half an hour longer in Asda than we normally do at Tesco, had to navigate a hellish assault course of screaming children and squinting old people, and were served by the winner of Grumpiest Till Person 2008. Was it worth it?
The jury’s out on that one, but if I have to clear up one more pile of Asda own-brand meaty-chunk cat puke, I might have to say no.
