Oswestry21

Headlines such as “Tesco enjoy best Christmas in three years” and “Cut price ASDA slices through the recession” are doubtless heartening to shareholders, but behind the figures lies a more depressing story for shoppers.

“Supermarket giants Tesco and Asda dramatically increased prices on key items in the runup to Christmas in what an independent expert has called “a systematic, cynical and aggressive attempt to exploit demand”, a Guardian investigation can reveal. Batteries, lightbulbs, medicines, Christmas drinks and must-have children’s toys were among essentials whose prices were increased.

Both companies ran marketing campaigns before Christmas and at New Year boasting of thousands of price cuts but many consumers will have been unaware that they were also raising thousands of prices in the same period”. (Systematic, cynical, aggressive’: expert verdict on Tesco & Asda prices. Guardian, Feb. 12th 2010)

While supermarkets are keen to trumpet the price falls in 1000’s of selected Christmas “essentials” The Guardian reports on a third party retail survey (”We used data compiled by third party analysts from the Asda and Tesco online stores to show how many price rises were imposed between December 9 and December 22″) of prices in Tesco and ASDA which reveal 1000’s of price rises between the 9th and 22nd December ‘09. While the price falls hyped by supermarkets often fall into the bracket of a matter of pence, the price rises in the case of ASDA range from 455.5% to a fraction of a percentage over a range of 2059 items, and in the case of Tesco from 158% to a fraction of a percentage over a range of 1578 items.

In the article: “How supermarkets can cut ‘thousands of prices’ but your bills may go up” by Felicity Lawrence, Guardian, Friday 12th Feb 2010, Professor of Retailing Paul Dobson of Loughborough University, who has been conducting a five year study of prices at the big 4 -Tesco, Sainsbury’s, ASDA & Morrisons said: “Retailers are happy to tell us about their price cuts but they forget to tell us about the price rises. We keep hearing about a price war but it’s the most curious price war I’ve ever heard of, where you can’t detect an overall drop in price levels or a fall in profits.”As anyone knows, you don’t make money by being generous. And if you do by appearing to be so, then it’s achieved by sleight of hand.

A recent news article in the ‘Tizer reported that Sainsbury’s in Oswestry has started handing out free storage containers to customers to ‘help people do their bit to reduce the amount of food that goes to waste’.

      Laudable though this initiative may appear, it is somewhat ironic given the role that supermarkets play in creating food waste. Each year, up to 20 million tonnes of food are wasted in the UK, and most waste occurs before food even gets into our homes. British farmers are forced to waste millions of tonnes of fruit and veg before they even leave the farm, simply because the produce does not meet the strict cosmetic standards stipulated by supermarkets.

     Within homes, consumers bin around £12 billion of groceries each year, including nearly 100,000 tonnes of poultry meat. One major cause of food waste within homes is date-labelling, which confuses customers.

      Sell-by dates, which supermarkets use for stock control, have nothing to do with food safety.

      Best-before dates, which are supposedly for quality control purposes, are overused and often unnecessary; it’s obvious when fruit and veg, for example, are past their best.

     Even use-by dates are abused, as manufacturers set dates far in advance of when the food is likely to go off.

     Another source of food waste is supermarket bogof (buy one, get one free) offers or, even worse, buy three for the price of two, which encourage customers to buy far more fresh produce than they can realistically use before the excess starts to rot in the fridge or fruit bowl.  Consumers are essentially paying supermarkets for the privilege of throwing away excess supermarket stock, and thus saving the supermarkets the cost of doing so.

      Fortunately, shoppers in Oswestry can evade sell-by, best-before, bogof and other corporate chicanery by purchasing fresh produce from independent local food shops and market stalls, who will sell the exact amount you need – and offer free advice on what’s in season / the best cut of meat for a particular recipe, etc. 

George Monbiot writes about his own town.

Time out with flu has curtailed editorial activities somewhat, so belatedly getting this up from the Food Festival, which by all accounts was  deemed a success by all who attended, so thanks to all involved.

 OS21 attended to talk about issues that it is involved in and to hand out information, and to run a competition to guess the price differential between two equally comparative baskets of food, one sourced from the market, and the other from a town supermarket.  Quality was compared to quality, so supermarket basic versions were not used. The competition aimed to prove that market sourced food was cheaper, better in quality and was often more generous in terms of price per unit, e.g a punnet of nectarines in the supermarket contained 4, and a punnet from the market contained  8.

 The baskets contained a sample of staples - bread, fruit, veg, eggs, fish, a bunch of flowers, and apart from the price difference mentioned below, there were also considerable differences in quality of service and social interaction. Fish was cheaper, more choice, could be prepared and filleted and plenty of advice and suggestion, and orders taken.  Same with meat - sausages and pies locally made, bacon home cured, meat cut to request, cooking advice and orders taken. Eggs were cheaper and local free range, a bunch of flowers also cheaper. The only item that was slightly cheaper in the supermarket was bread - but then not locally baked and a lower quality product in taste and looks.

 The supermarket basket for 10 items: £25.72

 The market basket for equivalent items: £21.13 

Which makes the market basket almost one fifth cheaper than the equivalent supermarket basket. Quite a saving! And worth using the market for!

 The winner of the 1st prize - the market basket, was, I’m informed, Emma Jones.