Feb 18 2008
Save Money Don’t Shop at Supermarkets
All the discussion supermarkets and their prices seems to miss the point about what it costs to shop at supermarkets. Let’s start with “the facts”: supermarkets do drive down the cost of individual items in your shopping basket so shopping at a supermarket does on the face of it save you money!
But look at it from a psychological perspective instead: faced with the cornucopia of a supermarket consumers simply buy far too much with the result that the cost of shopping as a whole goes up. BOGOFs, special deals… you name it; the supermarkets tempt you to buy a little bit more of everything in bigger boxes and bags. Notionally you shop for the next few weeks but you can’t shop for fresh vegetables for the next few weeks so inevitably you are back in the aisles later in the week and so the cycle goes on of buying again when you dont really need it.
Does this argument stack up? Evidence from reports suggest the we throw away as much as 1/3 of all the food we buy, worth an estimated £8 billion per year and this figures is only for consumers and not business waste of food as well. We get it wrong in two ways: we buy too much so that it goes off in the fridge and we get our portions wrong, serving too much on the plate and then having to throw it away afterwards. The end result is 6.7 million tons of edible food disappearing to landfills and as it breaks down producing the equivalent of 20% of car use. In other words, if we got our shopping and serving right it would be the equivalent of taking 1 in 5 cars off the road.
More importantly it would save you money. However you can go a lot further than this by buying food with a plan and then buying better quality. Ironically buying cheap food does not necessarily save you money. Rather than buying chicken breasts, buy a whole chicken and then share over a number of meals. By the time you are finished with the carcass, it will be wrapped in newspaper and have provided you with sandwiches, risotto, soup and maybe a pie. It will also have provided all manner of fun in the kitchen and if you pour a glass of wine for you both, you will be chattering all the while and enjoying the social space of shared activity as well.
This is not a grumpy complaint about tescopoly but rather a celebration of “slow food” with a realisation that for every penny we save in a supermarket, we more than spend in waste and want not.
