Struck a deal .......

[theabsinthefairy]

........ with my other half.

He wants 100euros to buy a second hand piston for his tractor. So to save the money, he has to stay out of a supermarket for the whole month of April.

He is a complete supermarket freak and would happily spend all day trawling the shelves not just looking but buying all sorts of completely useless stuff that I already have in the pantry. Then moaning that there is nothing to eat!

I think that we can save the 100 euros by the end of April if he just doesn't go shopping.

Day one - he is already worrying that we don't have enough coffee for the month!

[Rosendula]

I think supermarkets are adictive until you learn to hate them. Your hubby is about to learn a very interesting and valuable lesson. Once you've succeeded at this, you could point out to him that £100 a month is £1200 a year. Imagine what he could buy with that!

[Green Aura]

I think supermarkets are adictive

I think supermarkets invest an awful lot of money making sure of it

I agree, it will be a complete eye-opener when he realises how much he's frittered away in supermarkets. And what he could do with the money otherwise - just don't introduce him to fleabay

[pelmetman]

100 euros to get piston? I can get piston on a lot less than that

Sorry could not resist it

[red]

son and I were in a supermarket for first time in months.. had to wait for a bus, and next one due in an hour, and it was raining.

wow - I'd forgotten how much temptation is in those places. the vast array of foods and goodies.. the piped smell of hot cross buns that magically hits you at the door...

I confess i did buy a few things.. but they were only things I wanted and cannot get in the village (dates, poppy seeds for baking) - but it did make me realise that you have to have a large break from supermarkets to see how they manipulate you

[Millymollymandy]

I loathe French supermarkets, There is nothing in there that tempts me and I just buy what I need which is always the same things every time. It's a horrible but necessary experience.

However let me loose in an English supermarket and I'm like a kiddie in a sweet shop, I just walk up and down every aisle oohing and aahing over all the wonderful things!

But I would soon get bored of English supermarkets too if I lived there, I'm sure, seeing the same old stuff all the time. Mind you I never got bored of M&S food department. Yum!

[mrsflibble]

we did a similar but not the same thing. tired of being overdrawn every single month, i sat down with 6 months of bank statements and a pack of highlighters and worked out what our actual spedig was. turns out we were keeping tescos afloat.

so, we switched to asda for a start, and also worked out that we can have up to £100 per week housekeeping which includes some money for a take away. generally fish and chips. if there's other things we need, i do less supermarket shopping and make more things from scratch and see what we can save. it's like a game to me lol.

[Silver Ether]

I cut down my working hours about 3 years ago so was able to shop properly and not use supermarkets so much... the money I saved was GASP awesome... like £4/500 per month. while I admit I am not feeding quiet so many kids thats still a lot of cash. We aren't short of anything soI have no idea what I used to buy that took up that amount of cash ...

[red]

we saved a fortune by not going to the supermarket. theres a mini coop and bakers butchers grocers etc. mostly if i cant buy it locally.. we dont have it. even though some things are lots more expensive (coffee for example) we stills ave lots by not going where all those other foods live. we are not suffering or lacking anything.. but i dont by what i dont need.

and now supermarkets feel fake and surreal!

[theabsinthefairy]

Personally I hate the supermarkets and will only enter one under duress or to keep my hubby from spending a months budget on crap.

The downside to the deal is that when we do need something only available from the dreaded place I shall have to go in now.

We have a bio (organic) shop locally and I use that mostly, as well as a local butcher and a flour mill, and we have cow's milk on tap as it were, as well as a local ''cave' for wine. My pantry is well stocked and we have alcoholic beverages like beer and cider I have made .....

.... as I write this and mentally think through the long list of what I have in stock - I should not need to go into a supermarket myself! Yippeee - let's see if I can do a month without a supermarket too.



Oh yeah - just remembered - my teen is only happy to face the day once she is full of cereal and as two weeks of school holidays are looming she will need several packets to make her reasonable.

[MuddyWitch]

You could cheat & shop online at T€$co$/sainsburps/a$da...

All our cereal comes,along with coffee, tea and carob-covered raisins, from http://www.goodness.co.uk/cgi-bin/page/index. They often deliver the next day, too, at no extra cost.

MW

[citizentwiglet]

we did a similar but not the same thing. tired of being overdrawn every single month, i sat down with 6 months of bank statements and a pack of highlighters and worked out what our actual spedig was. turns out we were keeping tescos afloat.

so, we switched to asda for a start, and also worked out that we can have up to £100 per week housekeeping which includes some money for a take away. generally fish and chips. if there's other things we need, i do less supermarket shopping and make more things from scratch and see what we can save. it's like a game to me lol.

Really? We've just swapped from one to the other, as we got sick of A$da's phoney rollbacks - i.e. loaf of own brand bread - 64p for months and months. Put it up to 78p for three weeks, then reduce it to 74p and call it a roll-back. It's NOT. It's still 10p more than it had been for months and months, even when flour was apparently at a premium.

We go to the supermarket for 'staples' now - loo roll, washing up liquid, tinned goods etc. We have a really strict list, and we only go into the aisles we need. Although I have noticed how the supermarkets are getting savvy to list-users, by swapping around the produce so you really have to hunt for what you want, or 'running out' of certain things on the shelf, but conveniently having plenty of the more expensive branded equivalent. With ePOS systems being so sophisticated, there really is no reason to run out of Value Tinned Tomatoes. Unless, as I suspect, they are out in the warehouse and are the last to get shelved, particularly when the Reduced-Section-Bargain-Shoppers like us are out wielding our scarily frugal lists.

When they swap the aisles around, I have a tantrum. We ignore the aisle-ends completely; and we've seen some shocking examples of what looks like a good deal.....buying two small tins 'on offer' for more than the price of a larger tin, for example (can't remember the prices exactly, but a deal on 2 x 150g tins of sweetcorn still worked out 15p more expensive than one 300g tin); but they also totally f&ck up on pricing, allowing me to buy MSC certified sardines for 15p a tin instead of £1.50............

[JulieSherris]

....... but they also totally f&ck up on pricing, allowing me to buy MSC certified sardines for 15p a tin instead of £1.50............

Love it!!
Our local supermarket recently had a promotion on loo roll - but the 8 pack was nearly treble of the 4 pack price! I pointed the mistake out to one of the girls & she changed it - then it was actually cheaper than the 4 pack!! I bought 2 packs that day - and it was amended once more to the 'proper' promotion price 2 days later....

Just before xmas I bought coffee & noticed on the reciept that the cents had been charged, but not the euros..... I went back in, made sure to go to the young girl & not to 'Ann' (a full-timer) and bought 5 more jars!
And the young girl didn't bat an eyelid when she charged me 3.25 euros for 5 large jars of coffee!

[Millymollymandy]

Brilliant Julie!

CitizenTwiglet - oh I so agree, we go through the same rubbish with moving things around at our supermarket. They extended and became a hypermarket instead of an already huge supermarket and have gone sooooooo downhill, the produce is all over the place and not where it once sensibly was and drives me nuts trying to find anything i.e. putting the bread yeast in the baking section, not with the flour where it used to be and where it is in every other supermarket. Now to shop for bread flour and yeast I have to look in the organic section, the flour section and the baking section. All in completely different parts of the bloody shop.

I always check prices and thankfully the prices are given as price per kg or litre or price per item allowing you to not have to do mental arithmetic (oh my god I hope they are correct!!!) so you can see for example which is the cheaper of say shower gels which are all in different ml size containers, or packets of 6 or 9 or 12 loo rolls.

But everything takes so long, always comparing prices and trying to actually FIND things, so it is half a day gone to do the food shopping every 10 days, which is such a pain in the bum!

But we have no choice here, even the little mini markets are all owned by the supermarket chains and there are no independent grocers shops.

[citizentwiglet]

I understand quite a bit about merchandising, and the swapping things around is the sure fire way of you picking up something you don't need.

Here, the yeast has also moved from where the flour / corn-flour / suet etc is; and is stuck on it's own next to the preserves. The preserves have moved from next to the cereals, to next to the bread - and their lovely spanking bakery, which pumps out lovely smells. What's it doing? It's saying 'You know you want to say F7ck the yeast, I'll just buy a lovely fresh loaf and....mmmm...what's that jam I can see to go on it?', and there you've spent £2.00 instead of 38p for a pack of 5 yeast sachets.