Suggestions please

Paula1981

Hi, slight rant alert! I have gone through my finances, & my biggest outlay is food shopping, for the 4 of us i spend between £350 & £400 a month in the supermarket. We dont have anything nice, like cakes, crisps etc, we dont drink either. Our only supermarket in the Co-op & i live on an island & dont have a car so i have no choice but to shop there. I got 2 bags of shopping yesterday & it came to over £70. There own brand dosent seem to last long in terms of bread, usually its already going stale before you get it home, meaning i have no choice but to spend £1.30 on a loaf. I am honestly at the end of my tether. I know every supermarket is putting prices up just now but the co-op seem to have been doing it on a weekly basis for years now. How are we meant to sustain this? Should the co-op, being the only supermarket on the island, have a responsibility to look at the demographic here & price accordingly? The majority are pensioners or young families. We cant afford to pay mainland prices. We actually have kids asking for money or for people to buy them food from the reduced section. Can anything be done? 

Farway

Sorry to hear of your plight, but I don't really see how a shop should price according to the demographic of the local area, although to some extent most do in as much as the more affluent areas prices are probably more expensive than the less affluent, but unless it's a charity where the loses are covered by donations etc than paying what it costs to produce & supply is all part of the capitalist system we live in

You say you live on an island, so I'm assuming even online delivery by say Amazon would be more expensive even if available?

Years back when I was working in the Scottish highlands where there was also only the Co-op in the town, the locals found it cheaper to club together & one drive across to Inverness and bulk buy groceries, If that sort of solution would work nowadays with fuel costs, I don't know

mac.d

Apart from bulk buying on trips to the biggest nearby town on the mainland, which you can't do if you don't have a car, the only option is what Farway suggests, get together with others to do so. Unfortunately, fuel prices make even that difficult to save much. What else is there? Do batch cooking to try and freeze meals, but the cheaper loaf and freeze it, only defrost what you need each day? There's not much.

Problem is, the Co-op has a monopoly in these places, and they pass on the cost of their higher costs (fuel, energy) to their customers.

Rosa_Damascena

OP, in your position I would take pretty drastic action: I'd eat less, stop buying stuff that goes past it's best before you have a chance to eat it and start growing my own spuds at least. Its far from ideal to go hungry in these enlightened time, but 100 years ago it was actually quite normal for the majority of families to struggle to feed everyone. I know it's not an ideal solution but living on an island your options are going to be limited.

MrsStepford

£350 - £400 pcm is not outrageously expesive. Co-op  is, however, wherever you live. Businesses do pass on transport costs to island dwellers even on the Isle of Wight. and that's not a recent thing. 

Suggest making your own bread, I think Jack Monroe has recipes in her cook books. Is your island big enough to have independent shops, farm shops or farmers' markets ? Supermarkets are convenient one-stop shops but they aren't necessarily the cheapest.

Foraging.. do you know any foragers or could you take a foraging class ?  Blackberries, mushrooms, beech nuts, seaweed, shrimps, cockles, mussels - depends on where you live as to what's available. 

If you have a fishing licence you could catch fish if your local waste water company isn't discharging sewage theren. As you're o an island, you should have access to the sea, so seaweed, samphire, crabs, cockles, shrimps and beach fishing (no licence needed). Again, you need to make sure no sewage outfall neaeby. 

If you can get them delivered, Approved Foods, Motatos, Poundshop.